Currently there is no specific policy on dementia care in India. Rather, the responsibility for care for people with dementia is not clearly articulated and formal care services straddle mental health and aged care. The result is that much care is placed upon individual families. This paper critically reviews Indian legislative and policy documents on this field of care, namely, the Mental Health Act 1987, the National Mental Health Programme, the National Policy on Older Persons and the Senior Citizen's Act 2007. The invisibility of dementia care in public policy translates into the absence of adequate treatment facilities and mental health staff, and leaves informal care-giving unsupported. This gap is replicated in mental health and dementia-care research and literature in India, with little being known about how family carers respond to the experiences of care-giving, manage the stigma, and access support. As India, like other middle-income and low-income countries, is experiencing an increase in its older population, more research is needed to develop the epidemiological, medical and anthropological understanding of ageing, dementia and care. This knowledge is vital to understanding the cultural context of the disease and must also be incorporated into public health policy if there is to be effective management of the rising need for personal care.

Over the past few years, the pivotal roles older women play in responding to the unprecedented HIV/AIDS epidemic in southern Africa has received increasing recognition by academics, governments, funding agencies, non-governmental organisations, and citizens around the world. Yet, discourses surrounding AIDS and ‘grandmotherhood’ are laden with a number of ungrounded assumptions that have important implications for researchers, advocates and decision-makers. Drawing on ethnographic and survey data predominantly from South Africa, this paper challenges seven such assumptions. The paper illustrates how certain prevailing ‘wisdoms’ about grandmothers and AIDS in southern Africa are not entirely accurate and may mask many women's struggles and vulnerabilities, perpetuate stereotypes and misguide well-meaning policies. It also suggests that the societal impacts of AIDS in the region are, at present, not as dramatic as often portrayed, largely because the strength and resilience of many older women have cushioned some of the negative consequences. The paper thus calls for more nuanced and forward-looking analyses and interventions – ones that recognise grandmothers as central to the society's thin safety net and that grapple with older women's complex and diverse vulnerabilities.

As people grow older in late life, their need for help with the activities of daily living increases. In Spain, those who need such help constitute about 20 per cent of the population aged 65 or more years. Support may be from formal care, informal care or both, and the type has different consequences for care receivers and their social networks. The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between informal and formal care and the use of health services among older people in Spain. Using a sample of 1,148 respondents aged 65 or more years from the Spanish National Health Survey of 2003, we analysed the association between the sources of care (formal, informal, both, or no care) and the frequency of three types of health-care utilisation: hospitalisation, emergency services and medical consultations. After controlling for sex, age, level of difficulty in the activities of daily living, self-perceived health status, and social class, it was found that older people with disabilities who received neither informal nor formal care were more likely to consult physicians than those who received informal care, but that there were no significant relationships between the type of care and health-services utilisation. The findings provide new information about the consequences of the different types of care of older people with disabilities, and suggest specifically that informal care substitutes for some tasks usually done by health professionals.

How older women cope with challenges and losses in later life influences not only their physical health but also their psychological wellbeing and quality of life. The purpose of the analysis reported in this paper was to understand how participation in a women's leisure-based social group – the Red Hat Society® – serves as a coping resource for older women. The Society is an international organisation of women aged 50 or more years and has the mission to ‘celebrate the silliness of life’. The Society currently has an estimated one million members in 30 countries. To understand the ways that social group participation may contribute to older women's health and wellbeing, this paper examines the dynamics of leisure-based coping with positive emotions as the focus. Based on an analysis of responses to an open-ended question about meaningful experiences associated with being involved in the Red Hat Society, the sample of 272 members identified the main reasons for their involvement as chronic and acute stressors, challenging life transitions and daily hassles. In addition, they described four ways that participation helped them to manage these stressors: as a context for social support, emotional regulation, sustaining coping efforts, and meaning-focused coping. The results are discussed in relation to theory and previous evidence on the role of positive emotions and leisure in coping.

Three hypotheses concerning negative social interaction in later life were evaluated in this study. First, it was predicted that greater personal economic difficulty is associated with more frequent negative social interaction with social network members in general. Secondly, it was proposed that more frequent negative social interaction exacerbates the undesirable effect of personal financial strain on change in self-rated health during late life. Thirdly, an effort was made to see if some types of negative social interaction, but not others, accentuate the undesirable effects of personal economic problems on self-rated health. Data from two nationwide longitudinal surveys that were conducted in the United States revealed that greater personal financial difficulty is associated with more interpersonal conflict. The findings further indicate that the undesirable effects of personal economic difficulty on change in self-rated health are more pronounced at progressively higher levels of negative social interaction. Finally, the data suggest that one form of negative social interaction (not getting help when it is expected) is more likely to intensify the unwanted effects of personal financial strain on self-rated health than other types of negative social interaction.

Recognition of the greater capacity of older women to draw on supportive social networks has now supplemented an earlier focus of research into gender and ageing which portrayed older men as a ‘privileged gerontocracy’ because of their greater access to financial resources and spousal care. This study of the experiences of cancer among people of three different age groups conducted a comparative keyword analysis of their narratives to consider the gender differentiation of a third resource: access to medical information and personnel. The analysed narratives were sampled from a large archive of research interviews. It was found that older men with cancer demonstrated a greater involvement with medicine as an expert system than younger men or women or older women. This stemmed from their social confidence when interacting with doctors and their interest in treating their illness as a ‘problem’ to be fixed with medico-scientific solutions. Compared with younger men and women of all ages, older men were less likely to draw on informal social and family networks for support, or to discuss in a direct style the emotional dimension of illness experience. Our findings contrast with other studies that have reported linguistic disadvantage in older people in elderly care settings, which underlines the importance of context for linguistic studies.