Health and Social Care Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Health and Social Care - Essay Example g. the development of Type II diabetes. However the most definable kind of aging is the chronological aging which refers to the advancement in years that people undergoes. (Marcia, 1980) As people age they undergone different changes in all aspects of their like. This paper will look into details of aging, the changes that people undergo as they age and the help they can get from social workers. Let us first look at the changes people undergo by looking at the factors that may lead to loss of identity. There are various factors that can lead to loss of identity as people age. These factors can take social and biological dimensions. Many studies have explored these factors and have described the role of biological and social factors that leads some aspects like dementia which cause loss of identity. Biological factors like cellular memory loss and degeneration of brain cells are have been pointed as leading factors in loss of identity. Protein damage of cells which can be attributed to biological process can be held responsible for change in the memory which leads to loss of identity. But biological factors needs the effects of the environment in order to express the genetic make up. So it is the social factors that can mostly be held responsible for this loss. It depends with the angle of your argument on loss of identity. We know ourselves We know ourselves because we identify ourselves. One of the greatest psychologists who looked closely at the theory of identity in aging was Erick Erickson. Erickson formulated several stages of development. Erickson's theory of personality insisted on the Freudian theory but can be described as Neo-Freudian. He was described by many other authors as ego psychologist from his work on stages of development. His study works is marked by a conflict whose resolution results in a favorable outcome. Erickson termed the favorable outcomes of each stage as virtues which come out of the conflict in each stage of growth. In his work on those conflicts, Erickson identifies two conflicts in the old age, Ego versus Despair. According to Erickson, the Ego identity enables each person to have a sense of individuality. Erickson described stressed that "Ego identity, then, in its subjective aspect, is the awareness of the fact that there is a self-sameness and continuity to the ego 's synthesizing method and a continuity of one's meaning for others. In his work, Erickson came up with the term "identity Crisis" which showed the actual conflicts that people undergone in life. He described identity crisis as a time which is marked by intensive analysis and exploration of different ways of in which somebody looks at oneself. He traced the identity crisis from the time of childhood and traces it up to the old age. In all these stages, Erickson identified different types of identity crisis that we undergo through in life. Erickson defined identity as "a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his communality. In him we see emerge a unique unification of what is irreversibly given - that is, body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, infantile models and