Health is deteriorating with more or less marked vulnerabilities when a well -defined threshold of health authorities are passed.
Aging includes several dimensions: physiological, psychological and social. If age is calendar, the experience of age is different depending on the context. In the past, retirement marked a fairly strong break and a brutal rocking in aging. Today, this is no longer the case. “To the question of whether it is possible to precisely determine an” old age “, the answer cannot be decidedbelieves Benoît Schneider, professor emeritus at the University of Lorraine and honorary president of the French Federation of Psychologists and Psychology. Aging is a progressive process, a course at the end of which a state arrives, that of being old.“”
For the High Authority for Health “The definition of an elderly person depends on the context. Fragility – more than civil status age – helps to better understand people who come from geriatrics. Entry into old age does not refer to any particular age but to a state of functional incapacity subjectively or objectively experienced according to the elderly themselves“. It is between 50 and 75 years – even if we can remain generally in good health – that we enter a phase of progressive vulnerability. Not that we are considered” elderly “from the age of 50, but it is admitted to say that risk factors can start to express themselves at this age.
In practice, the commonly accepted limit of the “elderly” person is 75 years old, according to the High Authority for Health, an age from which health begins to deteriorate sustainably, with more or less marked vulnerabilities and a less intense social life. At the societal level, several terms are used for each age: “senior” from 55 years (world of work), from 70 years (medical world), “elder” from 75 years old, “third age” between 75 and 85 years and “great age from 85 years”. “”Being of a mature age allows the realization and the accomplishment of self, recalls our interlocutor. It is up to us to choose what to do with this time, be it a journey, from time spent with your grandchildren “.
Aging is therefore specific to everyone. It is sometimes accelerated by a difficult psychological context, a disease or the early mourning of a loved one for example. Aging will inevitably occur, but differently depending on the way in which everyone applies experienced events, especially negative, traumatic events or those likely to cause a crisis. The stages of life necessarily play on the transition, on the transition from adulthood to that of an elderly person.
