Great interest has been shown in recent years about the influence of diversity on access to health care and health status, especially over the life course. Substantial interest has been shown in diversity by race/ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and also sexual orientation and rurality. A life course perspective whereby life conditions earlier in life influence health care access and health status later in life, with increasing application of an intersectionality perspective, is crucial to understanding how statuses delineated by social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and age interact to influence later life outcomes. Application of intersectionality to the study of aging and health is relatively recent, in conjunction with the increasingly popular cumulative advantage/disadvantage life course perspective, promises to lead to significant advances in the field of diversity, aging, and health in the United States and elsewhere.
Article
Health and Health Care Access Among Diverse Groups of Elders in the United States: An Intersectionality Approach
Sadaf Arefi Milani and Kyriakos S. Markides
Article
Prevention of Suicide
Danuta Wasserman
Around 700,000 people take their lives each year worldwide. Suicide accounts for approximately 1.3% of all deaths and therefore represents a major public health problem. The global age-standardized suicide rate is 9 per 100,000 population, yet there are large variations among genders, ages, countries, and world regions. The stress–vulnerability model of suicidal behaviors has been proposed to explain how a diathesis, developed through the influence of genetic and neurodevelopmental factors in relation to perinatal, postnatal, and life experiences, interacts with different risk and protective factors that either decrease or enhance the individual’s level of resilience to stress and suicidal risk. Public health suicide prevention strategies include suicide means restriction, reducing harmful substance use, promoting responsible media reporting, public-awareness campaigns, gatekeeper trainings, school-based interventions, crisis helplines, and postvention. Mental health strategies comprise identification, treatment, and rehabilitation of persons in distress and at risk for suicide. Multicomponent strategies that use a combination of evidence-based methods from public and mental health sectors are recommended. Future work should aim at enhancing the quality of epidemiological data, improving the research on protective and ideation-to-action factors, expanding the quantity and quality of data coming from low- and middle-income countries, and evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different suicide prevention strategies.
