Pandemics, Welfare, and Aging

This chapter focuses on mental health issues in the UK, where older people have become a rapidly expanding proportion of the population. While resources do need to be targeted on the vulnerable older people with mental health problems, the presumption that older people as a whole are an economic and health burden must be questioned as this has consequences for health and well-being. This is arguably an ageist approach that needs to be combated by locating how biomedical views on aging seep into health policy spaces in the UK that position negative perceptions of aging as both individual and populational problems. The chapter then moves to observe the Foucauldian implications of bio-medicine for older people in the UK in terms of “vulnerable” aging but deconstruct such “fixed” explanations by juxtaposing active aging as key narrative that epitomizes “declining to decline” as espoused by health sciences in a paradoxical public pandemic in an era defined by COVID-19.