title: -At an age when patients need help, illness is promoted by the structures of geriatric care.
abstract: Psychological changes or rather the recovery from psycho-somatic diseases at old age can point out a chronic failure of solutions. This means that in the course of their individual life people have not found satisfying solutions for conflicts and identity endangering stress. The result of such a process often means an advancement of diseases in old age. This is the reason why it is very important-especially for aged and/or care-needing people-that concepts are developed in the field of geriatric nursing that provide solutions for life that has been "misunderstood". But the old-peoples-care, which is oriented one-sidedly on physical deficiency, prevents the process of reconciling with lived and not lived life. The consequence is that certain forms of diseases in correspondence with changes in behavior leading to aggression, apathy, depression etc. are supposedly (medically) "cured" or "stagnated" by the use of neuroleptica. The possibility of a self-responsible, positive life-mastering is suppressed. The questions for the causes of psychological changes at old age remain unasked, and they are simply called "mental and physical stagnation caused by old-age". In practice, this means that the geriatric system rather supports illness than health and self-determination at old age.
authors.forename: W
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Frieling-Sonnenberg
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D005851:Geriatric Nursing; D006293:Health Promotion; D006801:Humans; D010550:Personal Space