Meaningful work throughout our lives
Dr. Keita was on target framing the issue of ageism as a health issue in her May Monitor column "Speaking up against ageism." In his dissenting opinion in Bradley v. Vance, a case concerning mandatory retirement, Thurgood Marshall wrote, "The lack of work is not only economically damaging, but emotionally and physically draining … Ample clinical evidence supports the conclusion that mandatory retirement poses a direct threat to the health and life expectancy of the retired person."
When opportunities to work productively are denied to qualified older people, where will they find meaning in their lives? Some of the factors impeding successful aging are not developmental. An older person's abilities and strategies may be irrelevant if he/she is not allowed the opportunity to continue to work meaningfully. Lack of equal opportunity is not limited to employment, nor is it absent from academia. The institutionalized age prejudice to which Dr. Keita refers, though not driven by animus, is discriminatory nonetheless, based on assumptions about a class of people that may not apply to all members of that class.
I am a 64-year-old doctoral student in developmental psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center, a model of diversity, where faculty and students have been exceptionally welcoming. Other universities were not as receptive to an applicant already past 60. Rather than looking at age as a negative, university faculty involved in admissions decisions should consider the possibility that the experience that comes with age may give added value to an older applicant.
Jon Taylor
City University of New York Graduate Center
Why we marry
Regarding the article on same-sex marriage in the May issue ("Who me? Marry?"), there are numerous reasons people choose not to marry besides previously never having the option, and potentially now feeling pressure to marry. I have/had several LGBTQI clients, straight clients and cisgender clients, ranging in ages from their mid-20s to early 70s who have no desire for marriage, and some have no aspiration for marriage equality. Some think the institution is pointless or perhaps outdated; some think marriage is a heterosexual construct that is not worth attaining; some think marriage is overly constricting; and some think that marriage is overly idealized. Some think marriage should not be connected to taxes or estates for same-sex or other-sex couples. Their reasons vary, and they may be judged as pathological. Some of these people have such beliefs while maintaining healthy relationships. These clients challenge the traditional societal values associated with the achievement of marriage. They are likely a minority of the minority, but their voices are still heard, in private.
Rebekah C. Markheim, PsyD
Denver, Colorado
Speak with your children
While no one can dispute the value of most education (May Monitor, "What makes pre-K good?"), the cheapest and most effective early intervention "program" would be for parents to read to their children from 2 years of age onward, and to speak with rather than to them (as by explaining why something should be done rather than merely saying, "do it because I say so"). The latter behavior, when frequent, depresses the development of both abstract thinking (as per Bernstein1) and of intrinsic motivation, that "motivation which is inherent in information processing and action" (as per Hunt2) and energizes spontaneous learning.
Stanley Goldstein, PhD
Middletown, New York
1Bernstein, B., Social Structure, Language and Learning, Educational Research, 1961, Vol. 3.
2Hunt, J. McV. Motivation inherent in information processing and action. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Cognitive factors in motivation and social organization, New York: Ronald, 1963.
On the gun violence report
The APA Gun Violence Task Force (reported on in the May Monitor) missed two essential components needed to lower violence in the United States. First, in the 1970s, 94 percent of the mentally ill were released from psychiatric hospitals; the number of psychiatrists and the use of psychological testing decreased. Second, employment of at-risk teens and adults decreased significantly.
In Chicago and Cook County this was addressed with the $78 million U.S. Justice Department "Culture of Calm" program from 2009–12 and in 2013 with the $50 million Chicago Public Safety Fund. These programs provided afterschool and summer jobs, mentoring and anger management targeted to 5,000 and now 20,000 at-risk high school students. These approaches are estimated to have saved 193 lives and $1.4 billion.
In order to target employment to at-risk poor adults who commit the most violence, individuals' risk of violence must be appraised.We are offering inexpensive Internet testing to screen within schools, universities and work places to ensure medical care and treatment to those in need of both.
While the APA Gun Violence Task Force efforts are admirable, their suggestions are driven by literature reviews. Chicago's evidenced-based empirical, objective, data-driven, algorithmic approach has already proven successful. The savings in lives and resources were noticed by the media, who have basically ignored the APA report. Perhaps we should now turn to an empirical/applied approach.
Robert John Zagar, PhD, MPH
Chicago