You Don’t Have to Be Old to Be an Older Adult Peer Specialist

I’m 73. The longer I live the likelier I will live longer. But the life expectancy of Americans with serious mental illness—I’ve got bipolar disorder—is 10-20 years less than the 80 years or so for baby boomers. Therefore, I’m living on borrowed time.

To make the most of my last days on earth, I’m going to urge you today to live as well as you can no matter how old or crazy you are.

Sure, I have advantages that got me this far. I’m a white, straight, well-educated, middle-class guy with excellent health insurance. But I inherited heart disease from my parents. Like them I’ve had open heart, coronary bypass surgery. And the lithium I took for 25 years damaged my kidneys and thyroid. It also gave me a tremor that affects not only my head and hands but also my ability to swallow, so I’m liable to choke on food or drink. Now that would be a fine way to die if my waistline doesn’t strangle me first.

As a peer specialist, it’s my duty to model recovery far and wide—from NYC to the Catskills. My formula for the good life is:
early to bed, early to rise—to keep healthy if not wealthy and wise;
breakfast like a champion on Wheaties spiked with almond milk;
skip the spoonful of sugar that helps my meds go down;
eat that apple every other day so I don’t keep all my docs away;
walk fast but don’t run red lights;
work my ass off to keep my wife and cats in clover;
make friends not frenemies;
appreciate the birds and bees as well as human artistry;
write about mental health as if my life depended on it; and
put my faith in Jesus like a nice Jewish boy should.

Of course, I can’t ignore being person-centered, recovery-oriented, strengths-based, trauma-informed, and culturally humble, especially when supporting older peers, who need age-friendly places and spaces to thrive and all the resources they deserve for beating the odds against survival.

Again, I was lucky because, after many highs and lows, including suicide attempts, I never ended up in a state loony bin, whereas for many peers the cures offered by such institutions were worse than their diseases. Because treatments, including medications, had barbaric side effects, we understand why the now Nine Dimensions of Wellness are not found in some alternative universe, but are as down to earth as Wellness Recovery Action Plans.

There’s just one hitch and it’s a big one. How many of you here don’t want to think about growing old or believe that older folks should be neither seen nor heard? Don’t worry. I have a confession to make. Until I began caring for my 62-year-old brother with serious mental illness and dementia when I was 67, I thought aging was for animals, not human beings, because I’d seen my pets die more often than family members.

So, are you familiar with the A-word, Ageism? It’s not just about dissing old folks but also when adults poo-poo young people. And the antidote to this dis-ease, aka prejudice, is the solidarity of the generations. Aging is something we all do for better or worse and in similar or different ways. It all depends on nature and nurture. Not to mention race, class, sex, etc., etc.

That’s why I spent five years with the Geriatric Mental Health Alliance of New York lobbying OMH and the Academy of Peer Services for a supplementary older adult certification. Then, I and peer specialists Barbara Tedesco and Richard Lauder, plus geriatric social workers Michelle Zechner and Alexandra Webb, designed the five online APS courses necessary for the specialization, as well as manuals for in-person training to reinforce the digital learning.

Bottom line: You don’t have to be an older peer specialist to support older peers. Sure, being older can help you see eye to eye with them, if you’ve both had your cataracts removed. But take it from a cranky old fart, the attention of younger people makes me feel young again, if only so I can preach about the good old days when screen time meant watching Howdy Doody and Captain Kangaroo on black-and-white TV. And if you win my trust enough, we can level with each other about what wasn’t and isn’t so good now. Yes, I was a hippy-dippy child of the 60s who believes the last thing Donald Trump needs is an older adult peer specialist.

But fear not! The focus of the older adult specialization is on “positive aging,” which, if all goes well, leads to “positive dying.” BTW, I’m also certified as an end-of-life midwife or “death doula.” So, if I fail as an older adult peer specialist to help you be all that you can be, I can gently pick up the broken pieces that are left and place them in a gift-wrapped box for burying six feet under.

In fact, we older adult peer specialists pull out all the stops that prevent peers from acting as independently as possible in their later years. Especially in the last course of the APS older adult series on “Motivational Approaches and Personal Growth,” we emphasize that one small step for man, woman, and everyone in between, is akin to one great leap for humankind. In other words, we all have a stake in how we treat each other from cradle to grave.

Or as Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Grey Panthers, aging activists in the 1970s and 80s, said, “The best age is the age you are.”