Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

(5 of 10)

New findings show that hypochondria, or "high body concern," one of the most common neuroses of the elderly, can often be cured. According to Dr. Ewald Busse, director of the Duke study center, if a man's family "keeps criticizing him unjustly, makes him feel uncomfortable, unwanted, he may retreat into an imaginary illness as a way of saying, 'Don't make things harder for me.

I'm sick and you should respect me and take care of me.' It is clear from our studies that if the older hypochondriac's environment changes for the better, he will too. He will again become a reasonable, normal person. This is quite different from the reaction of the younger hypochondriac, who is much sicker psychologically and much less likely to respond to a favorable change in environment."

Recent studies bear out Sex Researchers Masters and Johnson's findings that men who enjoyed sex earlier in life can, if all else goes well, continue to enjoy it. Questionnaires over a ten-year period at Duke showed that the same men's interest in sex changed little from age 67 to 77, although there was a slight drop in activity. Result: a gradual widening in what the researchers coolly call the "interest-activity gap." A much lower proportion of women continued to be interested in sex after 67, but they managed to keep their interest-activity graph lines close together. "It depends on the individual," an elderly San Franciscan points out. "All ages have sexy people."

People expect old men to die, They . . . look

At them with eyes that wonder when.

Ogden Nash

A common and unfortunate diagnosis of many aged people is that they are senile, a catchword for a number of conditions. There may be organic brain damage for example, the brain may run short of oxygen because of impaired blood flow. But many of the "senile" actually have psychological problems. One 70-year-old retired financier, who insisted on calling his successor at the company all the time and had all sorts of paranoid suspicions, was diagnosed as having organic brain disease. A combination of psychotherapy and a new job as treasurer of a charitable organization helped the man to recover completely. Other "senile" patients actually suffer from malnutrition, or have simply broken down out of loneliness, perhaps caused by a temporary overload. As one old man put it: "There is no one still alive who can call me John." Explains Harvard Psychoanalyst Martin Berezin: "The one thing which neither grows old nor diminishes is the need for love and affection. These drives, these wishes never change."

Actually, senile traits are not peculiar to the aged. A group of college students and a group of the elderly were recently rated according to the characteristics of senility, and the students were found to be the more neurotic, negative, dissatisfied, socially inept and unrealistic. The students, in sum, were more senile than their elders. Other studies have shown that the percentage of psychiatric impairment of old persons is no greater than that for younger groups.