What’s the problem with older persons’ behaviours?

Abstract

ISSUES: Among the many pressing issues posited by providing care for the oldest and/or frailest proportion of ageing population globally and in Australia, one phenomenon particularly draws attention from domains of policy-making, service-provision and academia ---- behaviours of older persons as care recipients. DISCUSSION: This paper uses a post-structural approach to policy analysis to investigate how the said ‘behaviours’ are problematized differently (e.g. as challenging behavior, behaviours of concern and responsive behaviours) within Australian public health policy. By starting with practical texts and working backwards (as articulated in WPR approach (Bacchi 2012)), it is illuminated that behaviours are produced in discourses either as a medical object of ‘symptom’, a governing object of ‘threat’, or an epistemological object of ‘knowledge’. CONCLUSIONS: By reviewing literature on behaviours in policy-making, disciplinary research and intervention programs, the paper argues that the practices of problematization of the said behaviours are contested, negotiated and coordinated at specific times under specific circumstances (Mol 2002). The origins of medicalized discourses of behaviours are traced and the effects these discourses have on the subjectification of the ‘care recipient’ and ‘care provider’ are also explored. The analysis of discourses reveals the contrast and contradiction in the ways the said behaviours are problematized and thereby dismantles the seeming fixity of objects and illuminating the underlying, contesting and fluid strategic relations. IMPLICATIONS: To meet the challenges of providing care for the increasingly ageing population, once taken-for-granted ‘thoughts’ of behaviours need to be challenged and re-problematized as lived experiences in their various and varied modes and modalities.