This book sets out to cover the field as a general introductory text for counsellors working with older adults and, in its thoughtful and comprehensive survey of the diverse contexts and issues of ageing, it eloquently conveys the truth of the author's claim that such work requires specialist knowledge and skills of the practitioner. It focuses upon later life as a time of potential development, as well as on the difficulties and challenges of ageing, and it looks at a wide range of different settings that counselling for older adults may take place within. Fifteen chapters are organised into three sections, addressing theories and clinical skills; cultural and other contextual issues; and applied settings, such as rehabilitation, career, mental health, family and other forms of counselling.
Each chapter is well structured, beginning with one or two thought-provoking quotations, followed by a summary of what is to follow. At the end of each chapter, there is an ‘applied’ section. This includes a brief case study with questions for the counsellor, asking them to apply the thinking in the chapter to the clinical situation, as well as a set of questions on the chapter itself, and a glossary of terms. Thus the reader is helped to engage with the detail of the material covered, its application to the clinical setting and also to pursue the area further, with a guide to additional reading/research on the topic. This makes it an invaluable resource for teaching.
The book seemed to me to be at its best when discussing cross-cultural perspectives, which in addition to a substantive chapter, are threaded throughout the text. The author has a tremendous range, summarising vast areas of thought, putting different theories and belief systems alongside one another, encouraging the reader to think from different perspectives, and explicitly inviting us to consider how our own attitudes and beliefs about the topics covered will influence our work with older clients. This is a great strength of the author's approach, engaging with the reader, so that there is a constant invitation to examine one's beliefs and feelings about ageing and to apply the ideas covered in the text to clinical vignettes.
Although the clinical vignettes themselves are very good as far as they go, I did think that this element of the book could have been more developed. It is hard to move from quite complex theory or research findings, to applications to the clinical situation. How to use theory with people is a difficult matter, particularly for the neophyte clinician. In each chapter, a more theoretical or research-based summary tends to be the way in to each new topic, with the applied, clinical element coming in as a final ‘exercise’ for the reader. It felt to me, at moments, that I was being asked to make quite a ‘jump’ from ideas to their application, and that sometimes the author missed an opportunity to show more of the implications of the different theories or approaches – what they would mean, in more depth, if applied to the clinical situation. But this limitation is perhaps an inevitable cost of taking a wide sweep – depth of focus perhaps having to some degree to be traded for breadth of coverage.
The author has set himself an ambitious task and there is a tendency at times for a reliance on secondary sources to give authority to particular interpretations or statements about bodies of work. I noticed this particularly, for example, in the discussion of psychodynamic approaches, which are given quite a lot of coverage in the book. The author tends to select certain theoreticians within this approach, rather than giving a fuller account of the development of psychodynamic thinking, resulting in an account that at some points misses important developments in the field.
Notwithstanding these observations, this book has a great deal to recommend it. It covers enormous ground, for the most part succeeding admirably in its aims, with a rich and detailed coverage of the terrain, giving us a marvellous resource for counsellors and other clinicians working with older adults. Whilst at times, perhaps, the ambition of its scale results in some moments of unevenness which seem to me to stem from the difficulty of such a large project from a single author, there are also great strengths in this approach, in terms of overall coherence and unity of style. I very much hope that this book will be an evolving project, with new editions in future. To my mind, much of it works beautifully and I believe it has the potential to be a ‘first port of call’ resource for teachers and experienced clinicians, as well as those newly entering the field. I applaud the hard work, intelligence and humanity that have gone into this work, and I certainly will be drawing on it in future, in my clinical teaching.
