Promising Practices for Social Connectedness, Fall Prevention, and Improved Cognition: Should Social Care Be Prescribed? Should Life Be Medicalized?

The life of older adults is multi-faceted and the same can be said about the efforts to improve older adults’ quality of life. In this latest issue of Activities, Adaptations and Aging: Purposeful and Dignified Living for Older Adults, we present four exciting articles contributed by scholars from Mexico and the UK. Using a systematic literature review guided by the PRISMA protocol, Shoesmith, Charura, and Surr (2022) consolidated extant evidence on the effective components of visual arts that support older people with dementia. Their review reveals many positive outcomes for older people who have attended visual arts sessions. The benefits include but are not limited to improvements in cognition, communication, confidence, engagement, health, morale, quality of life, self-esteem, social connection, and wellbeing. Visual arts are well known for uncovering and exploring emotions, something desperately needed at least as an option for older people yearning to express emotion. Visual arts also bring pleasure, new knowledge, and new skills while facilitating self-expression. The review highlighted a profound observation by Walsh et al. (2011) that older people “seemed to be thirsting for contact” during visual arts sessions. More importantly, through this review, the authors discovered that the effectiveness of visual arts can be shaped by session content, participant choice, artistic ability, the role of the facilitator/therapist, group work, and setting. Specifically, the authors found one-hour sessions that are conducted weekly and that provide older people with decision-making opportunities such as the choice of art mediums to be highly encouraging. In addition, the authors observed that sessions that include both art viewing and art making together positively affect older people’s wellbeing. Noteworthily, visual arts sessions provide a natural setting for socialization, whereby participants talk with each other and compliment each other’s work. Also discovered was that visual arts experience by participants is not necessary whereas, and not surprising, skilled facilitation does make a positive difference when facilitators are skilled in both arts and serving older people with dementia. This work fits well with Lim’s (2022) theory of social influence as older people living with dementia are “thirsting for contact.” Thus, visual arts sessions can be considered in attempts to satisfy the need for social connectedness. ACTIVITIES, ADAPTATION & AGING 2022, VOL. 46, NO. 2, 91–95 https://doi.org/10.1080/01924788.2022.2070947