Recognizing Caregiving Fatigue in the Pandemic: Notes on Aging, Burden and Social Isolation in Emilia-Romagna, Italy

Francesco Diodati

doi:10.5195/aa.2021.352

Abstract

In Italy, the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated lockdowns have provoked potentially serious short and long-term consequences for older people with serious health conditions as well as their family caregivers. With the closure of adult day-care centres and the suspension of private homecare services, families have needed to rearrange care activities and many are concerned about the situation of their relatives in residential homes. This article examines interpretations of aging and caregiving fatigue during the first period of national lockdown in Emilia-Romagna, Italy. The relation between old age, lockdown, and social isolation, with respect to global ideas and rhetoric, focuses on vulnerability, individual autonomy, and caregiving fatigue. I examine how the representation of the ‘burden’ of caregiving in late age shaped the media depictions, and I analyze it in relation to the meanings of fatigue attached to narrations from family caregivers and the members of a local Alzheimer’s Café. I also focus on the life story of one family caregiver to critique the idealized vision of family care that was reproduced during the pandemic. I argue that the recognition of aging and caregiving fatigue during the lockdown reflected pre-existing normative models and structural inequalities of family care rather than radically altering them.

Highlights

At the end of February 2020, the Alzheimer’s Café in a small provincial town in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna closed along with the local senior day-care centre that hosted it
What happened to old age and caregiving during the first period of COVID-19 pandemic? Has the COVID-19 pandemic radically altered the way we understand fundamental notions of aging, care and family relations? In this article, I have presented representations of aging and caregiving fatigue that emerged during the pandemic in Italy between February and May 2020
Considering pandemic, lockdown, and social isolation with respect to pre-existing global ideas and normative models about senility, individual autonomy, and caregiving (Lamb 2017, xi-xv; Cohen 1995), I have examined a representation of the “burden” of old age that shaped the Italian media’s portrait of the vulnerable older people and their exhausted caregivers; I juxtaposed this representation with the narratives of daily struggles from family caregivers and the members of a local Alzheimer’s Café, including the psychologist

Summary

Introduction

At the end of February 2020, the Alzheimer’s Café in a small provincial town in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna closed along with the local senior day-care centre that hosted it. Mariagrazia brought Donata to the local Alzheimer’s Café after Donata’s geriatrician had told her that her mother “was cognitively ok” but needed to be in the company of and socialize with other people to alleviate the depression and loneliness that comes in old age. She continued: You know, my mother is in better shape than the other people [at the Alzheimer’s Café]; she has just a little bit of depression and her legs are not as good as they were in the past, but she doesn't have dementia and can still take care of herself alone She always complains about everything: for every little ache and pain, the medicines—she takes almost a quarter of the pills that the others have to take—people in the streets—“she gave me a bad look.”. We had an argument about that. [phone conversation; 8 April 2020]2

Objectives

Conclusion