1. Older people and emotional support
Findings from the
Someone To Talk To study
Simon Anderson

2. The Someone To Talk To study
An ESRC-funded project, jointly conducted by ScotCen and Dr Julie Brownlie at Stirling University
Focused on the general population’s views and experiences of emotional support
Anchored around
Survey of general population (n=2200)
Follow-up qualitative interviews (n=52)
First, though, I should tell you something briefly about the study and how it came about.
The STTTS is a research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and carried out collaboratively over the past couple of years by my own organisation, the SCSR and DASS. The team was made up of researchers from our offices in London and Edinburgh and Dr Julie Brownlie – a sociologist working here in the Department of Applied Social Science.
The study is focused on the general population’s views and experiences of emotional difficulty and emotional support.
It has involved a variety of different research methods, but has been anchored around two main elements:
A large-scale survey of the adult population of England, Scotland and Wales
A series of in-depth follow-up interviews with 52 of the survey participants.
It may be worth emphasising at this point that our data do not relate specifically to Scotland. We have chosen to give this event a specifically Scottish focus, though, for a number of reasons:
First, the team is based here
Secondly, we felt that such a discussion would benefit from the relatively tight nature of policy and practice networks in Scotland
And third, we were aware of the energy and emphasis that issues relating to population mental health have had in Scotland in recent years – and in particular the blurring that has happened between discussions about mental well-being and mental health.

3. Backdrop Academic theorising about therapeutic culture +
Increasing policy focus on talking therapies
But…
So where did the original idea for the study come from?
Well, we should probably emphasise that our start point was a largely theoretical one: we became interested in the fact that an increasing number of sociologists and social theorists were writing – either positively or negatively - about the ‘therapeutic turn’ or the rise of ‘therapy culture’.
At the same time, of course, we were also aware of the growing policy interest in issues relating to mental well-being in general and to the potential role of the talking therapies in particular.
But what struck us was that neither of these developments seemed to be especially well underpinned by empirical research. Much of the work within sociology relied on analysis of media and policy ‘discourse’ (citation analysis etc.), whilst the empirical studies there were tended to focus on service users of various kinds – and, indeed, on the efficacy of those services.
What we couldn’t find was any work that tried to locate these issues explicitly within the views and experiences of the wider population.
Little or no empirical grounding

4. Main concerns
Beliefs and practices of general population (not just service users)
Everyday emotional difficulties (not just major points of crisis)
The role (and limits) of talk
At the outset, then, the main concerns of the study were with:
The beliefs, experiences and practices of the general population – not just services users
But correspondingly, we were interested in how people experience and negotiate everyday emotional difficulties – the getting by or getting through that we all engage in – rather than simply with points of major crisis or breakdown.
Within that, we were especially interested to understand more about the role and limits of talk about emotional difficulties – both to those immediately around us and to professionals or others trained to help or listen.

5. General orientations towards emotions talk

6. General attitudes towards emotions talk
Agree strongly/ agree
Neither agree nor disagree
Disagree/ disagree strongly
Don’t know
I find it easy to talk about my feelings 55 20 25 *
People spend too much time talking about their feelings 35 40
I grew up in the sort of household where people didn’t talk about their feelings 49 14 37
People nowadays spend more time talking about their feelings 67 12 2
It’s important to me to be able to talk about my feelings 68 18 -
We used a series of attitude statements to tap into a number of dimensions of this, including:
I don’t want to spend too long on this (or any other) slide – you have copies in your packs – but I do want to highlight a couple of things:
First and most obviously, we’ve got a clear majority here agreeing that it’s important to them to be able to talk about their feelings and over half saying that they find it easy to do so – which obviously dents the image of Britain as an emotionally repressed, stiff upper lip culture.
So is this new? We can’t say from our data, since we have no earlier point of comparison.
But what is clear is that people think it is new. Two-thirds agree that people spend more time talking about their feelings than in the past and half that they grew up in a household where people didn’t talk about their feelings. 6

7. Belonging to ‘most positive’ group by age group and sex (%)
According to their answers to some of the attitude statements I just showed you, we split people into three groups: those who were most positive towards ‘emotions talk’, those who were least positive and an intermediate group.
What this graph does is summarise the two most obvious and recurring features of attitudes towards emotions talk: its powerfully age-related and gendered character.
The differences between men and women here are stark – especially for those aged under 45, where women are more than twice as likely to belong to the ‘most positive’ group.
But what is really interesting is the way that age group and gender interact. It’s really striking how much less likely those aged 65 + are, in general, to belong to the ‘most positive’ group. But there is also a narrowing of the gender gap.
In other words, older women have more in common with older men than they do with younger women. Younger women, by contrast, are much more similar to women in adjacent age groupings than to men of the same age.
Class or income is also a factor here, though a less powerful one. But the general point is this: we shouldn’t make simplistic assertions about ‘Britain today’ without considering the ways in which key characteristics (such as age, class and gender) may interact to produce very different cultural orientations and starting points. Hopefully, later on we can do some thinking about the implications of those starting points for service provision. 7

8. % very or fairly likely to deal with difficulties through bottling things up

9. Attitudes towards formal emotional support

10. Would feel comfortable talking to GP/therapist if feeling worried, stressed or down, by age group (%)
I don’t really have time to talk in detail about the patterning of these views across the population, but I will just point out an interesting age effect. We saw that older people are generally much less positively oriented towards ‘emotions talk’ in general. This does not seem to mean though that they would feel uncomfortable talking to their GP if they were feeling worried, stressed or down – in fact, they are far more comfortable with this idea than are those in the youngest age groups. By contrast, those aged 65 and over are the least likely to say they would feel comfortable talking to a therapist or counsellor, followed by those in the youngest age group. As you can see, it is those in their middle years who say they would be most comfortable with this idea.
So, despite growing up in an era and in households in which people seem much more comfortable with emotions talk in general, young people (under 30) appear reluctant to seek formal support. NOT JUST CULTURE BUT LIFESTAGE.
Again, we can layer the effects of class, income and education onto this. So the gap between, say, a young male with low levels of educational attainment and a middle aged woman educated to degree level is huge.

11. Informal emotional support

12. Proportion with three or more people could turn to, by age group and gender

13. Person most likely to turn to in face of emotional difficulty
These graph show who people would be most likely to turn to in the face of emotional difficulty by age group and gender.
So you can see that, for both men and women in the youngest age group, mothers are a relatively important source of support – but that this reliance drops away sharply for both as they age and spouse or partners come onto the scene.
But you can see that from the age of 30, for men, partners assume an overwhelming and consistent importance throughout the subsequent years. The proportion of women relying on partners does jump up, but not as high, and drops right away again in the oldest age group – presumably as many become widowed.

14. Most likely to turn to same sex friend in face of emotional difficulty
The significance of same sex friends as primary sources of emotional support also has markedly different patterns for men and women.
Among both men and women under 30, 13% report that a same sex friend would be their first port of call in the face of emotional difficulty.
For men, however, this drops right away in subsequent age groups, while for women female friends maintain a broadly consistent presence across the lifecourse.
Who is there for whom at what point
Have you ever talked about informal networks and assumed that these

15. Use of formal emotional support

16. Contact with formal emotional support, ever, by age group (%)16

17. Emotional legacies

18. Emotional legacies
Cultural beliefs about emotions are not clearly bounded by age but threaded through the generations
Example of the enduring significance of WWII

19. Intergenerational stories: ‘we got through the blitz…’
Because my dad is very much um…kind of like I said before stiff upper lip and you know, bad things happen and you just have to get on with it. And I think just a couple of minutes ago I said something along those lines that, I would like to think that I said it different to him but I think the meaning is the same, what we are both saying is that um…shit happens basically and you have to try and get on with it as best you can. I think where I would then start to branch away from my dad’s view is that um…I think everyone has got a threshold and if something is bothering you that much that you can’t just get over it and move on well then you know its good to know that there are other things out there to help you. But I have never got to that point whereas my dad…counselling would never even cross his mind.
*INT BECAUSE OF THAT HISTORY OF…?
*R We got through the blitz yeah! And that’s a bit of stereotype, I don’t know if I have ever actually heard my dad say that but its that kind of…um…mentally that he has got (Q51, M25MT)

20. Emotional legacies
Cultural beliefs about emotions are not clearly bounded by age but threaded through the generations
Example of the enduring significance of WWII
Continuities and discontinuities across age groups
From irrelevance to resistance

21. From irrelevance…
‘I mean it’s been underway for years now, but I don't think anybody ever knew anything about that. You only had your own family, and they used to talk about it and .. But other than that, I don't think they ever thought about going away .. I mean you read it [laughs] – these people, you know, that just cannot live. They’ve got to go and speak to somebody to buck their ideas up, and one thing and another..’ (Q47, M60LT)
The third and final constraint to talking relates to people’s beliefs. Indepth interviews suggest that beliefs about what good talking does/does not do are not, unsurprisingly, linked to emotional legacies within families, to memories of talking or not talking by parents and grandparents. Those interviewed, men and women, who were born after or during WW2 tended to describe the irrelevance of emotions talk, while those in their 30s, 40s and 50s describe memories of their fathers or themselves being brought up in stoical post WW2 Britain and how this shaped their understanding of emotions talk and for some, a wish to do things differently if not for themselves then for their own children.
To this extent the notion of a blitz mentality , a getting on with it mentality, is not just a static, historical one, but in British culture has strong intergenerational consequences. The point we are making here is that such intergenerational stories shape the belief systems of those who are now the audience for talking therapies. It is not just that older population may see such services as not relevant, but that this may morph into a resistance which is kept alive within families – like in this quote
although no generation speaks quite the same language so it adapts over time. As in the following extract from a 30 yr old man talking about the emotional differences between him and his father and in the extract after that the converse – a man in his fifties talking about his son in his twenties. 21

22. …to resistance
Resp: it’s seen probably as the correct, politically correct to share your feelings and so probably people like myself and that are kind of dinosaurs and not like sort of modern man and things like that
*I: [...] AS IF YOU’RE SOMEHOW LEFT BEHIND BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT THEY’RE DOING
*Resp: I think so. I don’t I don’t think I’m being left behind .I’m quite happy to be the way I am I....let them
*I: Yes..
*Resp: Sort of having to run and see somebody about every time I sort of spill a cup of tea or something , feel as though you’ve got to run to a therapist or something but I’m quite happy to not be like that
*I: Yes
*Resp: I’m not saying it’s wrong but I’m happy not being like that (Q8, M44LT)

23. Some final questions
Is older people’s self-reliance a resource or a problem? Is their reluctance to seek help a sign of resignation, resistance or resilience?
What is the relationship between life stage and cohort effects?
How will the beliefs and practices of older people change as the baby boomers enter older age?
What implications might that have for service provision?
Is there too great an emphasis on talk? How might the notion of ‘being there’ inform thinking about support for older people?
What should the relationship be between the formal and the informal? How can the former support – and not undermine – the latter?
If we build it, will they come…?