The Relationship with the Suffering Other: An Analysis of Attitudes Towards Respect for Older People in the Context of Social Services.

Population ageing, the increasing care needs of older people, shortcomings in Italian social policies, and the challenges posed by the pandemic some years ago have all highlighted a discrepancy between the widely proclaimed respect for the dignity of older manifests itself on structural, cultural, and even individual levels, including the attitudes of many social and health care professionals. In this context, this study focuses three distinct positions, or ways of perceiving the respect for existential suffering, that may characterise the relationship between social and health care workers and older individuals: (a) the efficiency-oriented attitude (of neoliberal inspiration), in which respect and admiration are primarily directed at those who manage to age actively by «staying young» despite their age; (b) the «care-taking» attitude (of welfare orientation), which considers the elderly as deserving of respect out of professional duty, even when they are so ill or impaired as to be perceived as a burden to society; (c) the attitude of mature reciprocity (in a Relational sense), according to which it is the condition of suffering itself, that makes frail older people, worthy of being honoured by social services professionals, who approach them in a spirit of experiential learning. These three attitudes give rise to different types of care relationships, which will be analysed through the lens of the Relational paradigm. The empirical basis of this paper consists of a secondary analysis of qualitative data collected through 44 semi-structured interviews conducted during the pandemic (August-October 2020) in seven residential care homes in Emilia-Romagna, involving facility coordinators, care staff, family members, and elderly residents.