“In our culture, we’re taught to see older adults and aging as this problem that needs to be fixed,” said Corey Mackenzie, director of the U of M’s aging and mental health lab.

The lab focuses on understanding how mental health changes while aging.

“We live in this youth-oriented culture,” Mackenzie said. “There’s massive marketing campaigns, anti-aging creams, and lotions and potions that people should take to kind of fight this [supposedly] terrible aging process.”

That in mind, Mackenzie’s lab places emphasis on the positive emotional health changes that tend to come with age. On average, he noted, older adults are mentally healthier than younger and middle-aged adults.

This “positive aging” message is key to the lab.

Mackenzie’s longstanding research interest lies in the question of why older adults are the age group least likely to seek professional help for those mental health challenges.

The intuitive answer proposed may be that, older adults, having grown up in a time where accessing mental health services was uncommon and largely frowned upon, experienced stigma around seeking such help. Yet, Mackenzie’s research disproves that idea.

“Older adults actually have more positive attitudes toward seeking mental health services than younger adults,” he said. “They have lower levels of stigma related to seeking help than younger adults.”

While attitudes and stigma around mental health are indeed still a problem, Mackenzie noted that it is not behind older adults’ lower use of mental health services.

“There’s greater need in later life when people are really struggling in terms of getting them access to mental health services,” Mackenzie said. “So that’s one of the things we’re interested in — improving access to mental health services for older adults when they need them.”

Mackenzie is affiliated with the U of M’s Centre on Aging, the first and oldest centre on aging in Canada. At the centre, researchers including Mackenzie approach aging from diverse angles, including biology, neurology, social sciences and humanities.

“All of that work is really meant to position aging as this important process,” Mackenzie said. “We all do it. It’s happening to every one of us and [we need] to embrace it.”

Mackenzie highlighted the overwhelmingly negative narratives surrounding aging, conceptualizing it as depressing and conjuring up images of wrinkles, sicknesses, memory loss and diseases. While aging may, indeed, come with increased health challenges, older adults generally navigate those challenges more effectively than younger individuals.

He emphasized the value in “recognizing the wisdom, the experience, the mental health advantages that come with living 60, 70, 80 years on the planet.”

Mackenzie touched on two main theories surrounding aging.

The first is socioemotional selectivity theory, which focuses on how our goals change as we move through life. While younger adults tend to hold knowledge acquisition goals — like learning a new language, going to school or hiking across Europe — older adults tend to focus more on emotionally meaningful aspirations. An interest in having 600 Facebook friends, Mackenzie suggested, may shift to six close, real, long-term friends.

“There’s this sense that life is precious as you get older and time is running out that sort of orients people toward doing what matters,” Mackenzie said, “doing these kind of meaningful, purposeful things — spending time with the people we love, fostering community, all those good things.”

The second idea, strength and vulnerability integration theory, acknowledges the social and emotional strengths associated with aging, as well as vulnerabilities such as chronic illness and loss. Both, the theory emphasizes, can coexist.

Mackenzie is currently awaiting the review of a grant proposal titled Reimagine Aging.

“In [Reimagine Aging], and in general, it’s really important for us to think about aging not as this thing to be feared or as this terrible thing that’s happening to us, but as this sort of natural process that comes with a lot of cool things,” he said. “More wisdom, more experience, more ability to handle challenging situations.”

“Aging is complex and interesting, challenging and beautiful.”