In ‘Sweetie’ and ‘Dear,’ a Hurt for the Elderly
By JOHN LELAND - The New York Times - October 6, 2008
Professionals call it elderspeak, the sweetly belittling form of address that has always rankled older people: the doctor who talks to their child rather than to them about their health; the store clerk who assumes that an older person does not know how to work a computer, or needs to be addressed slowly or in a loud voice. Then there are those who address any elderly person as “dear.”
“People think they’re being nice,” said Elvira Nagle, 83, of Dublin, Calif., “but when I hear it, it raises my hackles.”
Now studies are finding that the insults can have health consequences, especially if people mutely accept the attitudes behind them, said Becca Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University, who studies the health effects of such messages on elderly people.
“Those little insults can lead to more negative images of aging,” Dr. Levy said. “And those who have more negative images of aging have worse functional health over time, including lower rates of survival.”
In a long-term survey of 660 people over age 50 in a small Ohio town, published in 2002, Dr. Levy and her fellow researchers found that those who had positive perceptions of aging lived an average of 7.5 years longer, a bigger increase than that associated with exercising or not smoking. The findings held up even when the researchers controlled for differences in the participants’ health conditions.
In her forthcoming study, Dr. Levy found that older people exposed to negative images of aging, including words like “forgetful,” “feeble” and “shaky,” performed significantly worse on memory and balance tests; in previous experiments, they also showed higher levels of stress.
Despite such research, the worst offenders are often health care workers, said Kristine Williams, a nurse gerontologist and associate professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing.
To study the effects of elderspeak on people with mild to moderate dementia, Dr. Williams and a team of researchers videotaped interactions in a nursing home between 20 residents and staff members. They found that when nurses used phrases like “good girl” or “How are we feeling?” patients were more aggressive and less cooperative or receptive to care. If addressed as infants, some showed their irritation by grimacing, screaming or refusing to do what staff members asked of them.
The researchers, who will publish their findings in The American Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease and Other Dementias, concluded that elderspeak sent a message that the patient was incompetent and “begins a negative downward spiral for older persons, who react with decreased self-esteem, depression, withdrawal and the assumption of dependent behaviors.”
Dr. Williams said health care workers often thought that using words like “dear” or “sweetie” conveyed that they cared and made them easier to understand. “But they don’t realize the implications,” she said, “that it’s also giving messages to older adults that they’re incompetent.”
“The main task for a person with Alzheimer’s is to maintain a sense of self or personhood,” Dr. Williams said. “If you know you’re losing your cognitive abilities and trying to maintain your personhood, and someone talks to you like a baby, it’s upsetting to you.”
She added that patients who reacted aggressively against elderspeak might receive less care.
For people without cognitive problems, elderspeak can sometimes make them livid. When Sarah Plummer’s pharmacy changed her monthly prescription for cancer drugs from a vial to a contraption she could not open, she said, the pharmacist explained that the packaging was intended to help her remember her daily dose.
“I exploded,” Ms. Plummer wrote to a New York Times blog, The New Old Age, which asked readers about how they were treated in their daily life.
“Who says I don’t take my medicine as prescribed?” wrote Ms. Plummer, 61, who lives in Champaign, Ill. “I am alive right now because I take these pills! What am I supposed to do? Hold it with vice grips and cut it with a hack saw?’”
She added, “I believed my dignity and integrity were being assaulted.”
Health care workers are often not trained to avoid elderspeak, said Vicki Rosebrook, the executive director of the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, a combined facility for elderly people and children that is part of a retirement community.
Dr. Rosebrook said that even in her facility, “we have 300 elders who are ‘sweetie’d’ here. Our kids talk to elders with more respect than some of our professional care providers.”
She said she considered elderspeak a form of bullying. “It’s talking down to them,” she said. “We do it to children so well. And it’s natural for the sandwich generation, since they address children that way.”
Not all older people object to being called sweetie or dear, and some, like Jan Rowell, 61, of West Linn, Ore., say they appreciate the underlying warmth. “We’re all reaching across the chasm,” Ms. Rowell said. “If someone calls us sweetie or honey, it’s not diminishing us; it’s just their way to connect, in a positive way.”
She added, “What would reinforce negative stereotypes is the idea that old people are filled with pet peeves, taking offense at innocent attempts to be friendly.”
But Ellen Kirschman, 68, a police psychologist in Northern California, said she objected to people calling her “young lady,” which she called “mocking and disingenuous.” She added: “As I get older, I don’t want to be recognized for my age. I want to be recognized for my accomplishments, for my wisdom.”
To avoid stereotyping, Ms. Kirschman said, she often sprinkles her conversation with profanities when she is among people who do not know her. “That makes them think, This is someone to be reckoned with,” she said. “A little sharpness seems to help.”
Bea Howard, 77, a retired teacher in Berkeley, Calif., said she objected less to the ways people addressed her than to their ignoring her altogether. At recent meals with a younger friend, Ms. Howard said, the restaurant’s staff spoke only to the friend.
“They ask my friend, ‘How are you; how are you feeling?’ just turning on the charm to my partner,” Ms. Howard said. “Then they ask for my order. I say: ‘I feel you’re ignoring me; I’m at this table, too.’ And they immediately deny it. They say, no, not at all. And they may not even know they’re doing it.”
Dr. Levy of Yale said that even among professionals, there appeared to be little movement to reduce elderspeak. Words like “dear,” she said, have a life of their own. “It’s harder to change,” Dr. Levy said, “because people spend so much of their lives observing it without having a stake in it, not realizing it’s belittling to call someone that.”
In the meantime, people who are offended might do well to follow the advice of Warren Cassell of Portland, Ore., who said it irritated him when “teenage store clerks and about 95 percent of the rest of society” called him by his first name. “It’s the faux familiarity,” said Mr. Cassell, 78.
But he mostly shrugs it off, he said. “I’m irked by it, but I can’t think about it that much,” he said. “There are too many more important things to think about.”
Read more in The New York Times
Showing posts with label age discriminations. U.S. Supreme Court. Show all posts
Showing posts with label age discriminations. U.S. Supreme Court. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Justices Say Law Bars Retaliation Over Bias Claims
By LINDA GREENHOUSE - The New York Times - Published: May 28, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that employees are protected from retaliation when they complain about discrimination in the workplace, adopting a broad interpretation of workers’ rights under two federal civil rights laws.
By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court found that the two statutes afford protection from retaliation even though Congress did not explicitly say so.
The decisions are significant both as a practical matter and as evidence of a new tone and direction from the court this year, following a term in which there were sharp divisions and an abrupt conservative turn.
The new rulings were in distinct contrast to one of the signature decisions of the last term, a 5-to-4 decision that placed tight time limits on plaintiffs seeking to file pay-discrimination cases. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the majority opinion almost exactly a year ago in that case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, wrote one of the two majority opinions on Tuesday. Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the other.
One of the cases began as a lawsuit by a clerk for the United States Postal Service in Puerto Rico. The plaintiff, Myrna Gómez-Pérez, 45 at the time, complained that she had been denied a transfer to a different office because of age discrimination. Her lawsuit alleged that as a result of her complaint, she became the target of retaliatory actions by her supervisors.
The other case was brought by a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick G. Humphries. Mr. Humphries had complained that a white assistant manager had been motivated by racial discrimination in dismissing a black employee. In his lawsuit, Mr. Humphries claimed that he then lost his own job in retaliation for his complaint.
Retaliation complaints are a growing subset of workplace discrimination cases, because it is often easier for employees to demonstrate that they were retaliated against than that they were victims of discrimination in the first place. Retaliation complaints filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled in the last 15 years to 22,000 from 11,000.
Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major federal statutes. One is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.
However, there is no such explicit protection in the portion of the age-discrimination law that applies to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War-era statute that gives “all persons” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court interpreted on Tuesday.
In both decisions, the majority relied heavily on precedent, reasoning by analogy from recent cases that dealt with claims of retaliation under other statutes. The most recent such case was a ruling issued in 2005, before either Justice Alito or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court held then that a law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, also prohibits school officials from retaliating against those who bring sex-discrimination complaints. The statute itself does not mention retaliation.
In his opinion on Tuesday in the federal age-discrimination case, Justice Alito said that the provision in question, broadly prohibiting “discrimination based on age,” was “not materially different” from the anti-discrimination language the court had interpreted both in the Title IX case and in an earlier decision from 1969, interpreting a Reconstruction-era statute that bars racial discrimination in property ownership.
“The context in which the statutory language appears is the same in all three cases,” Justice Alito said. “That is, all three cases involve remedial provisions aimed at prohibiting discrimination.”
In the Postal Service case, Gómez-Pérez v. Potter, No. 06-1321, the federal appeals court in Boston, which has jurisdiction over federal cases from Puerto Rico, dismissed the suit on the ground that the age-discrimination provision that applies to federal workers does not cover retaliation claims.
In his opinion, which overturned the appeals court and reinstated the lawsuit, Justice Alito said that understood in the context of its enactment, the provision did cover retaliation. He noted that while the basic age-discrimination law was passed in 1967, it was not extended to federal workers until 1974.
In the interval, the Supreme Court had issued its decision deeming that the 19th-century property-rights law covered retaliation. Congress was “presumably familiar” with that case, Justice Alito said, and “had reason to expect” that the new age-discrimination provision would be interpreted with similar breadth.
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, Congress was “well aware” that the Civil Service Commission had issued detailed regulations protecting federal employees against retaliation. The chief justice said that Congress should be understood to have made a judgment that retaliation problems in the federal work force should be dealt with administratively rather than judicially.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissenting opinion.
These two justices were the only dissenters in Mr. Humphries’s case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, which held that Congress intended to cover retaliation claims brought under the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that is usually referred to as Section 1981. The court upheld a ruling by the federal appeals court in Chicago, rejecting an appeal brought by the company that operates the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.
The Supreme Court’s decision last September to hear the company’s appeal was a surprise, because all the federal appeals courts that had weighed in on the question interpreted Section 1981 as covering retaliation. Resolving disputes among the lower federal courts is the Supreme Court’s main reason for accepting a case. The decision to grant this case in the absence of such a dispute spread alarm throughout the civil rights community on the assumption that a majority was prepared to shut the door on retaliation claims.
There was ample reason for that assumption, since Chief Justice Roberts had earlier made clear his distaste for precedents in which the court has gone beyond a statute’s text to infer a basis for a lawsuit.
It was especially significant, therefore, that both he and Justice Alito signed on to Justice Breyer’s discussion of the importance of “stare decisis,” the court’s doctrine of adherence to precedent. Even if the court’s approach to statutory interpretation was changing, Justice Breyer wrote, “we could not agree that the existence of such a change would justify re-examination of well-established prior law.”
He added: “Principles of stare decisis, after all, demand respect for precedent whether judicial methods of interpretation change or stay the same. Were that not so, those principles would fail to achieve the legal stability that they seek and upon which the rule of law depends.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, accused the majority of hiding behind “the fig leaf of ersatz stare decisis,” relying on precedents that had been incorrectly decided in the first place.
See Text Opinion: Gomez -Perez v. Potter and CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that employees are protected from retaliation when they complain about discrimination in the workplace, adopting a broad interpretation of workers’ rights under two federal civil rights laws.
By decisions of 7 to 2 in one case and 6 to 3 in the other, the court found that the two statutes afford protection from retaliation even though Congress did not explicitly say so.
The decisions are significant both as a practical matter and as evidence of a new tone and direction from the court this year, following a term in which there were sharp divisions and an abrupt conservative turn.
The new rulings were in distinct contrast to one of the signature decisions of the last term, a 5-to-4 decision that placed tight time limits on plaintiffs seeking to file pay-discrimination cases. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the majority opinion almost exactly a year ago in that case, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, wrote one of the two majority opinions on Tuesday. Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the other.
One of the cases began as a lawsuit by a clerk for the United States Postal Service in Puerto Rico. The plaintiff, Myrna Gómez-Pérez, 45 at the time, complained that she had been denied a transfer to a different office because of age discrimination. Her lawsuit alleged that as a result of her complaint, she became the target of retaliatory actions by her supervisors.
The other case was brought by a former assistant manager of a Cracker Barrel restaurant, a black man named Hedrick G. Humphries. Mr. Humphries had complained that a white assistant manager had been motivated by racial discrimination in dismissing a black employee. In his lawsuit, Mr. Humphries claimed that he then lost his own job in retaliation for his complaint.
Retaliation complaints are a growing subset of workplace discrimination cases, because it is often easier for employees to demonstrate that they were retaliated against than that they were victims of discrimination in the first place. Retaliation complaints filed annually with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled in the last 15 years to 22,000 from 11,000.
Congress has provided explicit protection against retaliation in two major federal statutes. One is Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The other is the provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act that applies in the private sector.
However, there is no such explicit protection in the portion of the age-discrimination law that applies to federal government workers. Nor is there explicit language in a post-Civil War-era statute that gives “all persons” the same right “as is enjoyed by white citizens” when it comes to making and enforcing contracts, such as contracts of employment. Those were the two statutes that the court interpreted on Tuesday.
In both decisions, the majority relied heavily on precedent, reasoning by analogy from recent cases that dealt with claims of retaliation under other statutes. The most recent such case was a ruling issued in 2005, before either Justice Alito or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the court. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court held then that a law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools and colleges that receive federal money, also prohibits school officials from retaliating against those who bring sex-discrimination complaints. The statute itself does not mention retaliation.
In his opinion on Tuesday in the federal age-discrimination case, Justice Alito said that the provision in question, broadly prohibiting “discrimination based on age,” was “not materially different” from the anti-discrimination language the court had interpreted both in the Title IX case and in an earlier decision from 1969, interpreting a Reconstruction-era statute that bars racial discrimination in property ownership.
“The context in which the statutory language appears is the same in all three cases,” Justice Alito said. “That is, all three cases involve remedial provisions aimed at prohibiting discrimination.”
In the Postal Service case, Gómez-Pérez v. Potter, No. 06-1321, the federal appeals court in Boston, which has jurisdiction over federal cases from Puerto Rico, dismissed the suit on the ground that the age-discrimination provision that applies to federal workers does not cover retaliation claims.
In his opinion, which overturned the appeals court and reinstated the lawsuit, Justice Alito said that understood in the context of its enactment, the provision did cover retaliation. He noted that while the basic age-discrimination law was passed in 1967, it was not extended to federal workers until 1974.
In the interval, the Supreme Court had issued its decision deeming that the 19th-century property-rights law covered retaliation. Congress was “presumably familiar” with that case, Justice Alito said, and “had reason to expect” that the new age-discrimination provision would be interpreted with similar breadth.
In a dissenting opinion, Chief Justice Roberts said that, to the contrary, Congress was “well aware” that the Civil Service Commission had issued detailed regulations protecting federal employees against retaliation. The chief justice said that Congress should be understood to have made a judgment that retaliation problems in the federal work force should be dealt with administratively rather than judicially.
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissenting opinion.
These two justices were the only dissenters in Mr. Humphries’s case, CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries, No. 06-1431, which held that Congress intended to cover retaliation claims brought under the provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 that is usually referred to as Section 1981. The court upheld a ruling by the federal appeals court in Chicago, rejecting an appeal brought by the company that operates the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.
The Supreme Court’s decision last September to hear the company’s appeal was a surprise, because all the federal appeals courts that had weighed in on the question interpreted Section 1981 as covering retaliation. Resolving disputes among the lower federal courts is the Supreme Court’s main reason for accepting a case. The decision to grant this case in the absence of such a dispute spread alarm throughout the civil rights community on the assumption that a majority was prepared to shut the door on retaliation claims.
There was ample reason for that assumption, since Chief Justice Roberts had earlier made clear his distaste for precedents in which the court has gone beyond a statute’s text to infer a basis for a lawsuit.
It was especially significant, therefore, that both he and Justice Alito signed on to Justice Breyer’s discussion of the importance of “stare decisis,” the court’s doctrine of adherence to precedent. Even if the court’s approach to statutory interpretation was changing, Justice Breyer wrote, “we could not agree that the existence of such a change would justify re-examination of well-established prior law.”
He added: “Principles of stare decisis, after all, demand respect for precedent whether judicial methods of interpretation change or stay the same. Were that not so, those principles would fail to achieve the legal stability that they seek and upon which the rule of law depends.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Scalia, accused the majority of hiding behind “the fig leaf of ersatz stare decisis,” relying on precedents that had been incorrectly decided in the first place.
See Text Opinion: Gomez -Perez v. Potter and CBOCS West, Inc. v. Humphries
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