Midlife Crisis Research Articles

Doctors: Automatons, technicians, or knowledge brokers?

Do doctors have the X-factor? I'm sure many of you do individually, but as a profession, what is it that appeals to others? I was prompted to this thought as I sat through the final sing-off of last year's contest—something that is almost inevitable if you have children of a certain starryeyed age. What judgement might the expert panel—and the public—pass upon the medical profession? ‘Great talent, dear, but no real conviction about where you're going.’ ‘A change of image would work a treat.’ ‘You sound good within your comfort zone, but take you outside it and you suck.’ Well, possibly, but at the very least the medical profession isn't sending out signals of satisfaction. A medical student told me recently that despite her natural equipoise and self-confidence, the transition to becoming a doctor is not a mouth-watering prospect. The junior doctors she has come across have been glum, disaffected and full of complaints. It was ever thus, of course: siege mentality is one way of coping with a profession that you have been inadequately prepared for and that creates pressure of time and pressure of decision-making. Yet there seems to be a deeper malaise on our wards. Doctors feel undervalued and over-managed. Not much X-factor there then. Dr Kildare has much to answer for. But the romance—in the broadest possible sense—that Dr Kildare enjoyed and portrayed is fast disappearing from medicine. Dissent is good, and it is important when it is about something that matters, like the philosophy of our health service. When doctors moan about pay, though, it has the ring of members of parliament asking for a minimum wage of £100 000 a year—privileged people stuffing their own mouths with gold, as John Main argued in last month's journal. The X-factor that attracted youngsters to a profession that was glamorous, socially valued, and happened to save lives in the process (and not necessarily in that order) is harder to identify. Doctors don't wish to become automatons, but the health service would presumably be run more efficiently by automatons rather than led by doctors who are busy asserting their right to clinical freedom. Perhaps not automatons, but what about technicians? Will we remain all-knowing, all-doing leaders of clinical teams or will we become technicians? We do our bit and then we disappear. Two cardiothoracic surgeons put this same argument to me independently. The future of bypass surgery, they say, is popping into theatre to do the grafts and leaving the rest—anaesthetizing the patient, opening the chest, putting the patient on bypass, closing and suturing—to other members of the cardiothoracic surgery team. You might initially consider this to be heresy but it might be better for the patient and for the efficiency of the health service. But as we strive to avoid our fate as mere cogs in the big machine of the NHS, how do we create a new X-factor that reaches out and attracts others? It might not be the magic ingredient that doctors were once familiar with: power. Indeed, there are very good reasons why this should not be the case. Medicine's midlife crisis may be more of a symptom of its own struggle to transform from a patriarchal profession into one that facilitates decision-making. Doctors in the new world would be gatherers of information relevant to individual patient care—the ultimate knowledge broker—instead of hunters preying on the ignorance of their patients to preserve their power and status. The allure of knowledge brokers will be high in a world that suffers increasingly from information overload. Knowledge, we know, is power, but brokering it is more valuable than guarding it. Could this be the X-factor that our profession seeks? ‘Yes, I'm really liking this,’ says Simon Cowell, X-factor judge and a man of blunt words. ‘I can see you getting a big hit with this one. It's a bit of a tricky concept but it's original and you've got the voice for it. More importantly, it's what the public wants.’

The Essential Chaplin: perspectives on the life and art of the great comedian

At age twenty-eight, Charlie Chaplin was a millionaire and one of the world's most famous personalities. He had grown rich playing the poorest of men. He was to go on playing unforgettable characters in timeless films, but now the psychology of celebrity began both to drive and to damage his creativity. Richard Schickel, the distinguished film critic, has called Chaplin the first victim of modern celebrity culture, driven by his relentless ego, by his helpless need for an audience to dominate, to lead. All the tragedies of his life stemmed from those drives and needs. Mr. Schickel is the rarest of Chaplin enthusiasts, an unabashed fan who can celebrate the object of his affection without looking away when his subject deserves a poking. In this indispensable collection of some thirty essays, he has selected the most provocative and insightful criticisms of Chaplin's life and work, from the great comedian's beginnings through his early features, his mid-life crisis, and his late films. The contributors include Andrew Sarris, David Thomson, Andre Bazin, Gilbert Seldes, Alistair Cooke, Frances Hackett, Robert E. Sherwood, Stark Young, Penelope Gilliatt, Edmund Wilson, Stanley Kauffmann, Alexander Woollcott, George Jean Nathan, Winston Churchill, Max Eastman, Graham Greene, Otis Ferguson, James Agee, Dwight Macdonald, Robert Warshow, Walter Kerr, J. Hoberman, and others. Mr. Schickel, the last critic to study Chaplin intensively (for his award-winning documentary of a year ago), offers a long Introduction.

Anxiety and Mid-life Crisis among Japanese Male Workers

Anxiety and Mid-life Crisis among Japanese Male Workers

Science Centers at 40: Middle‐aged Maturity or Mid‐life Crisis?

Abstract Science centers are maturing in an era in which learning has become acutely individualized, self‐empowered, and selective. The science center movement is now faced with a new educational environment that it can either embrace or ignore. What does it mean to be an institution in this deinstitutionalized world?

Stress buffering effects of social support on depressive symptoms in middle age: Reciprocity and community mental health

Little is known about the association between depression and the buffering effects of social support in mid-life crisis. The aim of this study is to determine the buffering effects of social support on depression concerning middle-aged individuals, while also taking reciprocity and gender differences into careful consideration. A cross-sectional survey of all middle-aged individuals (40-69 years of age) using a large sample (n = 4558) from a community-living population, who resided in Rokunohe town, Aomori prefecture in northern Japan (response rate = 69.8%), was undertaken. This town recently had a lot of suicides. Two-way anova was used to analyze the effects of stressor and social support on the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale scores. The authors found a stress buffering effect of social support on the depressive symptoms occurring in middle age, however, a significant difference in the stress buffer effect was only observed in male subjects. Moreover, when the authors take reciprocity into account, the effect of the buffer on depression was found not only in males receiving support but in males providing support as well. In conclusion, pertaining to males, social support reduces depressive symptoms under stressful circumstances in middle age, not only when they receive such support but also when they provide it. Therefore, these findings suggest that reciprocal social support is important for males in relation to community mental health.

Living Fully at Forty and Beyond

Islam recognises no mid-life crisis that presumably occurs around the age of forty. In America, however, since youth is the definition of life, turning forty is full of anxiety and melancholy. For many middle-aged men and women - as their juvenescence wanes and the illusion that 'life is a party' shatters - the personal threads of existence begin to unravel. Caught in the mid-life crisis, they experience gloom and depression. Some change jobs; some get divorced; some drink heavily or binge on food; some suffer from insomnia, and many live in anger.

A Conversation with Wendy Lill

Sarah Hubbard: Looking back those twenty-odd years since you arrived in Atlantic Canada, what brought you here in the first place? Wendy Lill: Well , my husband Richard was from here. He was from Halifax and we were living in Winnipeg. He was a journalist for the CBC and, you know, he kind of had a midlife crisis and decid ed he wanted to leave and com e home.

Looking Beyond Environmental Law's Mid-Life Crisis

Looking Beyond Environmental Law's Mid-Life Crisis

Serials—The Constant Midlife Crisis

Serials and the serials information chain have changed rapidly since the development of the electronic journal. Many recent developments are briefly described, including electronic resource management systems (ERMS) and functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR). The constantly changing nature of serials is compared to a psychological midlife crisis.

Serials—The Constant Midlife Crisis

Serials and the serials information chain have changed rapidly since the development of the electronic journal. Many recent developments are briefly described, including electronic resource management systems (ERMS) and functional requirements for bibliographic records (FRBR). The constantly changing nature of serials is compared to a psychological midlife crisis.

Psychiatrists Take Detour From Everyday Routine

Psychiatrists Take Detour From Everyday Routine

Anatomy of Midlife Crisis: From Broken Dreams to the Quest for Meaning

Anatomy of Midlife Crisis: From Broken Dreams to the Quest for Meaning

Midlife Crisis While Watching a Nature Program (Octopus marginatus)

Midlife Crisis While Watching a Nature Program (Octopus marginatus)

Therapy for the Middle-Aged: The Relevance of Existential Issues

Middle age is a normative developmental stage. Although further research is still required, there is general agreement in the literature as to the principal changes, conflicts, and tasks that are characteristic of this stage in life, and in particular, as to the nature of the transition to the second half of life, or what is commonly known as "midlife crisis." The dynamic psychotherapeutic approach to the middle-aged patient does not differ in essence from that adopted toward adolescents or the elderly. The current paper suggests that introducing existential issues and the existentialist therapy approach into analytic-oriented therapy is especially appropriate to the psychotherapy of individuals in midlife. The central themes of middle-age psychology are presented, and the relevance of the existentialist therapy approach is discussed in this context, with reference to four fundamental elements of the "existential discourse": death, isolation, freedom, and meaning.

The Power Elite at 50: C. Wrights Mills’ Political Sociology in Midlife Crisis

The Power Elite at 50: C. Wrights Mills’ Political Sociology in Midlife Crisis

The Pot Calling the Kettle "Black"

The world of performance provides a space in which to theorize and reflect upon identity. Traditionally, "blackness" has been susceptible to the identity politics circulating within the particular historical context of its representation on and off the stage. On the proscenium stage that was the auction block, for example, there was no question in the auctioneer or the buyer's mind that blackness was sutured to the phenotypical black body. That particular "opening" on the auction block was a command performance of blackness. The subversive, coded performances of the slave in the presence of slaveholders, on the other hand (i.e., spirituals, signifying, etc.), bespoke yet a different kind of "playing black"—a performance whose doubly intended signification had varying effects—e.g., escape, food, avoidance of beatings. To complicate matters, when white bodies began their "love and theft"34 shuffle of blackness via minstrelsy, playing black became an even more ironic, if not troubling, phenomenon. Undoubtedly, each of these terms—performance and blackness—signifies differently within the specifics of its historicity. Wedded together in dialogic and [End Page 605] dialectic tension, however, these terms are at the interstices of black life, politics, and cultural production. "Blackness" and "performance" complement one another in a dialectic that becomes an ontology of racialized cultural production. "Blackness," for instance, is a simulacrum until it is practiced—i.e., performed. The epistemological moment of race manifests itself in and through performance in that performance facilitates self- and cultural reflexivity—a knowing made manifest by a "doing." Far from undergirding an essentialist purview of blackness, performance, as a mode of representation, emphasizes the ways in which cultures struggle to define who they are and who they want to be. Blackness, however, is not only a pawn and consequence of performance; it is also an effacement of it. Indeed, according to Rinaldo Walcott, "to read blackness as merely 'playful' is to fall into a willful denial of what it means to live 'black.'"35 And as I have stated elsewhere, "blackness does not only reside in the theatrical fantasy of the white imaginary that is then projected onto black bodies. Nor is blackness always consciously acted out. It is also the inexpressible yet undeniable racial experience of black people—the ways in which the 'living of blackness' becomes a material way of knowing."36 The implication of this construction of blackness in relation to performance is that performance may not fully account for the ontology of race. The interanimation of blackness and performance and the tension between blackness as "play" and material reality further complicates the notion of what constitutes a "black play," and of what "playing black" is and what "playing black" ain't. A performance of an adapted short story for the stage at Northwestern exemplifies this complexity. In 2004 a class called "Performance of Black Literature" staged a production of Bruce Jay Friedman's short story titled "Black Angels." The story chronicles the life of Stefano, a New York Jewish suburbanite suffering a mid-life crisis because his wife has left him and taken their ten-year-old son with her. To make himself feel better, he decides to fix up his house and hires four black workers (the "black angels") who, much to his delight, charge him ridiculously low prices to do the work on his home (e.g., $58 to paint his two-story colonial). After the black men have transformed Stefano's home into a showplace, he is still unhappy. It turns out that what Stefano really needs is someone to talk to about his problems. In the end, it turns out to be Cotten, the head worker, who is most sympathetic to Stefano's plight. Realizing how "therapeutic" it is to talk to Cotten, Stefano asks Cotten how much he would charge to "listen" to him talk about his troubles once a week. Cotten's reply of "fo' hunerd" an hour sends Stefano into paroxysms, yet he accepts the offer and Cotten sits...

Heroes of Their Own Stories

This study of 14 international feature-length films (1988–2003) is aimed at providing gerontologists with models of successful aging that portray elders as being valued within the context of community. Elders serve as role models and mentors for the young, and they resolve mid-life crises for the middle-aged. Elders complete their life's work in the context of community (aging in place), where they struggle to maintain abiding values and draws others to the community. The study concludes with examples of key visual metaphors utilized at the endings of selected films that affirm the role of elders as catalysts for change for the young, the middle-aged, and even their communities.

It’s not a midlife crisis, but Daniel Allen feels it is time to take stock

On page 43 of Working Together – Learning Together, a 2001 Department of Health publication about lifelong learning, we meet fictitious Rebecca, a speech therapist.

Here/There: Cultural performances and the construction of a Latino locality at the communal fiestas in Adelaide

The Australian film Lantana, ‘a seductive adult mystery’, as this was promoted in Australia, explores the lives of urban middle class Anglo Celtic Australians whose mid-life crisis and boring suburbia drive them to search for new excitements. The Latino characters in the film play a supportive role to the central plot and are represented through the eyes of the white middle class protagonists. As such Lantana captures beautifully the way ‘Latin’ culture and dance are commercially promoted in Australia. Like in other commercial settings, such as nightclubs, dance schools and restaurants, the aim is to appropriate the U.S. style imagery of Latino culture.1

Community Psychology: Where Do We Go from Here?

Following a developmental analogy, community psychology may be experiencing a "mid-life crisis" as it enters "middle age." The field needs to determine where to go from here. This paper argues that the field should attempt to expand. Expansion can best be accomplished by celebrating the diversity of orientations within the field (e.g., those emphasizing prevention, empowerment, and the ecological perspective) and the wide range of human problems of interest to community psychologists. To promote expansion of the field, community psychologists need to seek out relationships with diverse groups, such as the international community, those working in applied settings, ethnic minorities, and students and early-career professionals.