Aging

I am both outraged and in agreement with Emmanuel.  I agree that our societal preoccupation with extending life as a goal in itself is ridiculous.  The American immortal is a concoction of the economy in the same way that we put youth and newness on a pedestal.  Life is not a quantity, it is a quality.

Ezekial Emmanuel  is a polemecist from a famous Jewish family of siblings  (his brother was Obama’s  White House Chief of Staff and  is now the mayor of Chicago) who was previously who were raised to debate.  These guys cut their political teeth on each other when they were still in diapers.   They know how to pick an edge of a controversial topic and exploit it. 

Donna Caires shared this link to a free course on "end of life conversations".  I think it's very helpful. 

 http://app.ihi.org/lms/home.aspx?CatalogGUID=debbdb58-726f-4a20-ac4a-7796b7d94d37

I will write about "Lifting the Latch" by Sheila Stewart for the biography paper. This book tells the story of someone's life from a very young age up until almost the end of their life.

Fire with Fire: http://vimeo.com/54668275

Some food for thought! This article has been causing a media firestorm--it's the one we discussed in AD&A on Tuesday. 

"Why I hope to die at 75" Wake up and smell the ableism! >_<

These statistics seem to indicate that feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, lonely, and stressed are common among college-age students. As Kroger suggests, these feelings should be typical for people going through a transitional period of identities and development. Many students feel depressed and caught between several identities and stages of maturation, with the latter enforcing the former. Students are in a constant state of stress, disarray, and insecurity, and also tend to get little sleep, or feel rested after it. This period of time is highly demanding for students, asking them to be constantly engaged and almost never settled. It’s no wonder students feel as though they’ve felt exhausted (not from physical activity) over the last two weeks.

I'm going to echo the sentiments of many others in this class that I am not surprised to find how high the reports are of hopelessness, exhaustion, anxiety, depression, and other related mental issues experienced by college students in the ACHA Health Assessment. As a current college student, I understand what it's like to fear the unknown and feel lost in life. Between choosing a major, sorting out finances, navigating personal relationships, and completing classwork among other things, college life can be beyond overwhelming and and there seems to be a permanent air of uneasiness during the year. As quoted by Kroger, "what should be present by the end of adolescence and the beginnings of early adulthood?

Beyond general acceptance across theories of adolescent development, the general public seems to accept Risky Behavior as part and parcel of adolescence.  Whether jumping off a bridge or driving too fast, adolescents engage in risky behavior as part of a journey away from parental controls, testing limits, and towards healthy independence and decision making on one’s own, and off to college is often when the opportunity first exists to take the full-fledged leap into the uncharted waters.  Mistakes happen; it’s a learning process. 

It’s not surprising at all to me that nearly half of the students who participated in this survey had “felt overwhelming anxiety” in the last 12 months and almost a third of them have “felt so depressed that it was difficult to function.” As several others have already mentioned, because of the nature of a college setting where much of students’ lives are separate from their parents, it makes a lot of sense that there would be such high rates of anxiety and depression. “What is a reliable index of character formation is the degree of coordination and integration among ego functions; adolescent closure occurs when character challenges become integrated and function in unison to mark an ensuing phase of greater autonomy and stability” (69).