Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development

Nice collection of case studies featuring geriatric counseling and treatment. Considering we are at the leading edge of geriatric science, this book does provide insight into clinical modalities and strategies to use with elderly populations.

George E. Vaillant is well qualified to write this book. He is a psychiatrist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a professor at Harvard Medical School, director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, and a respected researcher. Harvard Medical School professors have been studying the basic elements of adult human development for more than five decades. Three separate cohorts of 824 individuals were selected as teenagers for different facts of mental and physical health and studied for the rest of their lives to observe the adult life cycle and to provide a theoretical framework for understanding how older people become fulfilled or not. Harvard men were studied. In 1940, men who went to Harvard were rich, privileged, white, born to American born grandparents, and expected to equal or exceed their natural ability. In 1939, Sheldon Glueck obtained funding to do a prospective study of 500 youth sent to reform school and 500 matched school boys who had not been in any legal trouble at age 14. His wife restudied the groups at ages 17, 25, and 32. The control nondeliquent group had the same social risk factors that helped doom the delinquents-had repeated two grades or more in school, had foreign born parents, lived in blighted neighborhoods, and were from families known to five or more social agencies and more than two-thirds were on welfare. Valinti inherited the study when the subjects were 40, and subjects continued to have physical examinations every five years. At age 60, all but 2 of the 456 subjects were known to be dead or alive. For the Terman Women Sample, Terman tried to identify most of the brightest children in his three city area. He asked teachers to indentify the brightest in each class. He learned that the unattractive and shy children tended to be overlooked so that he only captured about 80 percent of the bright children. He used the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test to identify 1 percent of the California urban school children with IOs greater than 135 to 140 most of whom were born between 1908 and 1914. Four generations of investigators have followed the Terman men and women by questionnaires about every five years and by personal interviews in 1940 and 1950. The Terman women were not asked to provide regular physical exams. However, when compared to classmates, they had better nutrition, more humor, common sense, perseverance, leadership and popularity among their classmates. By age 80, they had half the mortality of white American women in their birth cohort. In comparison, at age sixty-eight to seventy, the inner city men had the same physical decline as the Terman and Harvard cohorts at seventy-eight to eighty. The difference was attributed to less education, more obesity, and greater alcohol and cigarette abuse among the inner city cohort. These cohorts seemed to demonstrate that it is social aptitude or emotional intelligence rather than brilliance or parental social class that leads to a well-adapted

I have now read this book twice and I share the fact of the wisdom it contains with anyone who will listen. I believe it is an excellent guide on the path through life, the journey to success as a human being. Here you can learn how to laugh into maturity and leave a legacy in old age. But it's about more than those. You can also learn how others have successfully and unsuccessfully navigated the challenges of the twenties, the rapids of the thirties and the doldrums of the forties. And by their examples you can create your own path through to self knowledge.

This is an outstanding book if for no other reason that it describes in detail not one, but three studies that have followed selected groups of individuals from youth through old age over the course of the twentieth century. Two of the groups studied were drawn largely from people of privilege, but the third most assuredly was not. The author became the ultimate caretaker of the data from the largest studies as part of his work at Harvard. As perhaps a sign of the times, the data from that study, which once was recorded painstakingly in ledger volumes now sits in his hard drive (one hopes carefully backed up). Simply learning that these studies existed was an eye-opener for me. What treasures! Though Vaillant happily draws a number of subjective conclusions from the data in the course of this book, he provides substantial information about the objective facts from which his conclusions are drawn. The reader is educated sufficiently to differ with confidence when so moved. The author's periodic confessions of how his views on various study participants evolved of the course of many years is a rather charming demonstration of aging well in its own right. This book is not intended as a scholarly work, however, and the data are not reproduced in full.I thought the descriptions of individuals who participated in the study, disguised though they might be, and of the author himself, to be the most interesting part of the book. Though they prevent _Aging Well_ from being a simple "Guide To Enjoying Being Old," the participant profiles provide considerable nuance and subtlety as the author ponders the age-old question, how are we to make the best of our lot in life?

While many individuals may find the reading is too classic textbook and dry for their liking, as one who has studied behavioural psychology, I found the book extremely mind-absorbing. The book closely follows a study of 824 individuals from birth through to old age and shows us how we can prolong our years and health. While genetics do play a role, there is little we can do to change our genetic make-up. What we can do is change our habits and day-to-day way of living. Easier said than done, but a choice, from a health perspective, that may yeild benefits as the years slowly slip by. One may think that avoiding alcohol and smoking, eating a healthy diet, exercising and maintaining a healthy weight are old hat issues, but the author shows just how dramatically those things can and do affect our remaining years. He also shows how sharing a happy, loving relationship can enhance our feeling of well being. Continuing the education process can also increase our state of health by challenging our mind and keeping it active and alert.Hopefully, younger, health conscious individuals will take avantage of reading this book in order to prevent many of the pitfalls we fall into as we age. Some of us wait until that magic middle-age crisis hits before we realize what we should have been doing years ago. However, it is never too late to change and many readers will find valuable information here that may make the aging years more fulfilling, healthy and enjoyable. A book, also highly recommended, is "The Wisdom of the Ego" by the same author.