The Practical Research On The Spirit Of Humanistic Care For The Oldest Widowed Elderly In Urban Communities

With the aging process keeping intensifying, it is predicted that our country will become the first country whose number of old people exceeds 2 billion in 2015. As the vulnerable group among old people, the aging problem of the elderly draws more and more attentions from different social sectors. As our traditional culture emphasizes family supporting, at present, the community-based care is still the main old-age care mode for the elderly in our country.Living with their children or living by themselves are the main accommodation modes of the elderly widowed people.In contrast to the old men with spouses, the elderly widowed people are short of casual supporting resources and are more pessimistic and sensitive in psychology. As their health conditions decrease and as they have experienced a series of negative events, the elderly widowed people confront many problems such as the change of accommodation modes, the tensive family relations, decreased communicating abilities, cognitive bias, etc. They become very vulnerable in face of various troubles as their own abilities decrease and are very easy to feel depressed, lonely, useless and have other pessimistic and negative feelings. Family, as the main resource of care for them, only pays attention to the basic life conditions and lack the spirit of care for the old men. Although, for the old men, communities carry out various spiritual and cultural activities, most of them are not applicable for the elderly whose physiology functions are deteriorating. With various factors combined, the elderly widowed people are extremely short of the psychosocial support and are very empty mentally.For this consideration, this paper will make a case study targeting at the elderly widowed people in the N community,Nanjing. This research is aimed at understanding the demands and conditions of the elderly widowed people, and, with the goals of improving their mental conditions and the index of happiness and with the focus on their demands, explores the intervention modes and methods of the social work suitable for them. The author selects two groups of the elderly widowed people that have different accommodation modes as the research subjects, and respectively use the the methods of the behavior therapy and family therapy to practice the case intervention under the circumstance that the demands of and the problems confronted by the aged and their families. Then, the author tests the intervention effects of the social work by the process evaluation and the result evaluation, and summarizes and considers the methods and experience of this case study. The study shows that the structural family therapy and the cognitive behavior therapy can help the community-based elderly widowed people to eliminate the negative feelings and re gain the confidence in life. And the two modes can help the social worker to realize the spirit of care for the community-based elderly widowed people, whichever accommodation modes they are in.The community-based care for the aged is the main care mode for the old people. In face of the rise of the aging process, we should explore and richen the socialized care service positively so as to make up for the shortage of the family support on the basis of emphasizing the normal function of the family support.The aged social worker must internalize the service skills and use the sustainable service plans to help people and themselves under the guidance of the value ideas of social work.