Historical lessons to watch your assumptions about aging: relevance to the role of International Psychogeriatrics.

For too long, too many in science and society alike viewed aging as offering little that was of value. There was a collective illusion of knowledge that aging was characterized by inevitable, unalterable decrements in functioning that led to a dismal destiny in later life. This was a widespread perspective on aging, especially in the scientific community. To the extent that scientists considered aging as a wasteland of scientific opportunity, they had little interest in studying it. By not studying aging, little new was discovered about it, thereby preserving negative assumptions about what later life held for all of us. Both Freud and Piaget, for example, viewed development of the mind as essentially a first quarter of the life-cycle phenomenon – psychologically for Freud, intellectually for Piaget (Freud, 1978; Piaget, 1972). But by the mid-1970s the first of two fundamental sea changes in how aging was perceived began to emerge. New hypotheses were generated that attempted to explain negative changes accompanying aging, not as representing normal aging but instead reflecting age-associated problems – modifiable disorders. For the scientist, the idea that a negative change is caused by a problem, and not normal aging, creates a new sense of opportunity to modify the problem. For the policy-maker, this recognition results in a new sense of responsibility to do something about the problem. This sea change in thinking about modifiable age-associated problems launched serious attention to growth of the field of geriatrics in the last quarter of the 20th century. The transition from seeing progressive, unalterable negative changes with aging as being one’s destiny to a new view of modifiable age-associated problems was an enormous leap in itself. While this was happening it was too big a leap to go the next step – to see that aging could be accompanied by potential beyond problems. But by the end of