Author Archives for Herb Weiss

Aging gracefully depends mostly on a positive attitude

Published in Pawtucket Times on March 2001

Years ago, my father gave ma a book, “Life’s Little Instruction Book”.  This book, listed as a best seller by the The New York Times, gave readers 511 suggestions, observations and reminders on how to live a happy, fulfilling and rewarding life.  I give you my version of the book, which can hopefully provide you with a rewarding life slanted toward how to age gracefully.

If I could offer you one tip on how to face the downside of growing older, I say practice looking on the bright side of things.  Every day you have a choice when you get up – the glass must be half-full rather than half-empty.  Attitudes become everything as you get older.

It seems that at the snap of a finger, we find ourselves past the prime of youth.   It is so easy to continually reflect on our successes and especially the bad hands we are dealt in life.  Savor your personal and professional victories but forgive yourself for your defeats.

View your past as a canceled check.  Let go of our past regrets and mistakes made in your youth and middle ages.  But also forgive yourself for your weaknesses.  Even for losing those long ago opportunities that passed right through your fingers, like sand in a clasped hand.  But don’t forget to forgive others too, those who hurt you personally or professionally.  You cannot live or end your life peacefully if you are still holding on to anger, bitterness and grudges, all tied to your past.

You must live in the present with an eye toward the future.  There is not enough time left for any one of us to live with past guilt or grudges.  Let go of the past.  Focus on the future, but live the present.

Don’t be afraid to “tell your life story.”  You have a huge reserve of untapped wisdom about living to share with others, especially the young, who can benefit from it.  Insights you have learned throughout the cyclical ups and downs of your life should be shared with your children and their children.  Younger generations will be at a serious loss if you choose to be silent and not share your knowledge.

Life is not a spectator sport.  Go for the gusto and stay as physically active as you can.  Research tells us “if you rest, you rust.”  Physical exercise elevates your mood and benefits your cardiovascular system.

Research tells us that you must also exercise your brain.  Take time to read daily newspapers, magazines or a local senior publication.  Spend your time working on a challenging crossword puzzle or even playing chess, or possibly mahjong.

Find meaningful things in your life that are bigger than you.  Engage in acts of loving kindness to others.  Research indicates that volunteer work can be a protective buffer from the curve balls that life may throw at us as we get older – or is that as we grow more mature?

Don’t be afraid of asking for help or support.  No one is an island, and we need to become more interdependent as we get older.  Research tells us the more types of relationships we have, from family members, friends, belonging to groups, the healthier you will be.  So, strive to keep up your social contact and personal connection with others.

Finally, no matter what your physical condition, there are always opportunities every day in your environment to help care for somebody.  Take advantage of every opportunity.

200 Attend Spiritualist Conference at RWU

Published in the Providence Journal on July 2, 1998

It was not the typical college course work that one  might find when browsing through Roger Williams University’s 1998  course catalogue.

For the novice students of spiritualism, the course title for the week of workshops, lectures and healing seasons might have read: Spiritualism 101: A Beginners Journey into the Spiritual Realms.

For more seasoned students, the program was more than just the basics. It provided them with sound tips on how to further enhance their mediumistic gifts – the ability to channel communication between the earthly world and world of spirits- and to sharpen their skills in giving public demonstrations.

More than 200 people, from 21 foreign countries, including New Zealand, Japen, Egypt, Israel and Finland and 12 states, came to Roger Williams last month to attend the 75th Congress Programme sponsored by the International Spiritualist Federation (ISF).  The umbrella organization, based in the United Kingdom, represents world-wide spiritualist groups with a combined membership of about 200,000 members.

Best selling book author James Van Praagh who wrote Talking to Heaven: A Medium’s Message About Life and Death, is a member of ISF. ISF held the event in Rhode Island to celebrate the 150th anniversary of spiritualism, which began in the United States.

Although the life styles and occupations of the novice and practicing mediums who came to the conference widely- including full-time practicing mediums, college students housewives, carpenters and elections, school teachers, artists, physicians, business owners and retirees – each had a common desire to experience communication between the world and the spirit world and to connect with their inner selves.

Internationally-known mediums and healers, conducted workshops, teaching techniques in healing and mediumship, according to ISF President Lionel Owen, a retired banker from the United Kingdom. Throughout the week, the 3rd generation spiritualism helped budding mediums and reminded the more experienced in his group on how to link up with their inner selves, become physically sensitive to inanimate objects and to the energy of people. On the last day, students under Owen’s supervision tested their mediumistic powers.

In a second-floor classroom in South Hall, Matthias Guddenstein, 58, bearded with long flowing black and gray-streaked hair, sat in a circle of 22 fellow students, totally fixated on his drawing.

During the two-hour session, which fellow mediums practiced giving each other messages from departed loved ones, the casually dressed primary school teacher wearing Birkenstock sandals, continued to sketch.

When finished, the six-foot-tall medium from Switzerland stood up and faced Jospeh Chishom, a 56-year-old carpenter from Wilmington, Mass, to deliver his message.

Guddenstein said that the departed relative, an older woman with white hair in a bun, wearing a string of pearls, had come through him. Chishom accepted the information telling the group that this described his mother.

“She is very outspoken and had keen insight,” stated Guddenstein, adding that the  disincarnate being gives her son encouragement and tells him to become more discipline and urges him to practice his healing. Again, a hit.  Chisholm tells his group that it seems like his mother.

Throughout the week fellow mediums, like Guddenstein in this circle gave each other messages from the spirit world at events, lectures, healing services and even at lunch breaks.

Guddenstein became interested in spiritualism more than 26 years ago when he served as a  translator  for British mediums in public seasons and private readings in Switzerland. “At first I was a skeptic.” But after listening to sitters deny facts coming through the mediums and then to later learn that they verified the messages by family made him a true believer.

“The conference is a good vehicle to meeting spiritualists from all over the world,” Guddenstein added. “It provides me with enrichment of knowledge as well as opportunity for personal growth.”

While many might not understand spiritualists and view those practices as unconventional, Mervyn Johnson, 52, a full-time healer and medium from London, who attended the conference, does not buy into this belief. “We’re basically very sound people from all walks of life,” stated the life-long spiritualist,” from solicitors, doctors to ordinary bricklayers.”

According to Johnson, spiritualists have a common belief of love, light and the existence of the human soul far beyond the physical Earth plane. “We believe in the great love of God without restrictions to that power,” he said, adding that spiritualists churches are open to all religious denominations.  Spiritualist churches, whose ministers have the  same rights and privileges under the law as ministers of other religions, are open to all religious denominations, he said.

Adds speaker Jean Holms, 52, a full-time Colorado-based practicing medium: “Spiritualists know that life continues after death.” Their beliefs can take away mankind’s fear of death and sense of abandonment when a loved one dies.

“Our loved ones and ancestors are readily available to us and can give us proof that they existed,” Holmes said. “They are around us every day and often give us thoughts of love, strength and support.”

For the novices, the intensive mediumship training and fellowship opened up new horizons revealing to them a whole new world, Owen stated. “They will never be the same,” he predicted.  But for all the ISF leader said, “attending the conference reaffirmed the main principles of the ISF that all life, not just human, comes from the same source and is linked together by the power of spirit. That the human personality survives death and can communicate with us in many difference ways.”

For more information on ISF, write to Lionel Ownes, 12 Hillswood Drive, Endon, Stoke-on-Trent., Staffs. ST9 BI, United Kingdom.  For details about the nearest spiritualist church, contact The Spiritualist Church of Brockton, 75 County St., Seekonk, Mass.

Mental Health’s Forgotten Constituency

Published in Aging Today in March/April 1996

The principal authors of a new report on mental health nursing homes charge that cutbacks in Medicare and the block granting of Medicaid will have a disproportionately large impact on the funding of mental health treatments. The report, “Achieving Mental Health of Nursing Home Residents: Overcoming Barriers to Mental Health Care,” which this writer helped prepare, calls mentally ill residents long-term care’s “forgotten constituency.”

According to Nancy Emerson Lombardo, one the new report’s authors, mental health experts worry that the situation for mentally impaired elders may worsen if proposals are passed by the 104th Congress to drastically cut Medicare, dismantle the Medicaid program and repeal essential features of the Nursing Home Reform Act.

Big Battle

Lombardo emphasized in an interview that, given present efforts in Washington to reduce Medicare and Medicaid spending. “It will take a big battle to restore mental health funding even to the inadequate levels of a few years ago, let alone bring it up to par with payments for treatment of other medical problems.”

She said that adding to the difficulties facing mental health advocates is evidence that many managed care programs taking over Medicare benefits for elders have greatly reduced mental health services.

Evidence has mounted in recent years, some from federal investigators, that physical illnesses of people especially frail elders, cannot be treated separately from mental illness. The report quotes a 1982 Government Accounting Office report that stated, “Left undiagnosed and untreated, mentally ill residents have limited prospects for improvement, and their overall conditions m ay decline more rapidly and ultimately place greater demands on the health care system.”

Achieving Mental Health…is being published this spring by the nonprofit Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for the Aged’s (RCA) Research and Training Institute in Boston, in conjunction with the Mental Health Policy Resource Center (MHPRC) in Washington, D.C. It is based on a 1993 invitational conference that brought together more than 130 experts in mental health and aging. Besides being released as an HRCA issue brief, the 50-page paper will be simultaneously published in the Journal of Mental Health and Aging (New York: Springer Publishing Company). The findings are being presented at the American Society on Aging’s 42nd Annual Meeting in Anaheim, Calif., in March.

The report enumerates a variety of obstacles to the provision of appropriate mental health services.  These include a shortage of mental health professionals trained in geriatrics; lack of in-service training in nursing homes to teach facility staff to treat behavioral and functional consequences of mental health or dementia; and inadequate Medicare payments and reimbursement rules that do not reflect the relative costs of preferred treatments.

Model Programs Recommendation

The report also notes that, in spite of these hurdles, model mental health programs do exist in some nursing homes; they are funded by an array of federal and state agencies, nonprofit foundations and even by some of the facilities themselves, drawing upon nonfederal funds.  The issue brief recommends that such programs be identified, cost-benefits calculated and the results widely disseminated to nursing homes for replication.

However, mental health experts involved in the issue brief agree that progress is slow and good mental health care in nursing homes is still exception rather than the rule.

Key recommendations in the report include:

  • Additional funding for research, staff training, and consumer education initiatives;
  • Improved Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement to pay for psychiatrists to train nursing home staff members in mental health services;
  • Sthe “unbundling,” or separating, of mental health services from nursing home per diem rates, so that funding intended for such assistance cannot be buried in lump-sum reimbursements for care and forgotten;
  • Full implementation of all federal nursing home reform mandates passed in 1987 and 1989, such as those requiring training for nursing home staff and strictly limiting the use of psychotropic drugs and physical restraints with residents;
  • Increasing the percentage of mental health services paid for by Medicare and other federal and private insurance to match that paid for other medical services.

Further, the report recommends that reimbursement incentives to be redirected to recognize  behavioral methods and deemphasize “medication-only” treatment.

The report’s authors added that Washington has failed to recognize cost-effective but humane alternatives to wholesale budget cuts.

For example, given the current antiregulatory mood in Congress, report cards for consumers can be one solution to assist family members in choosing a nursing home that provides adequate mental health training to its staff, said another of the report’s authors, Gail K. Robinson, deputy director of the MHPRC.

She suggested, “With such ratings, consumers and their families can be more selective in choosing a nursing home that provides better quality mental health care. Moreover, facilities could use the ratings to identify their weaknesses and correct them.”

According to Lombardo, there are less costly ways to improve mental health services than obtaining psychiatric specialists care for most residents. For example, she said, “The facility’s in-service training budget could easily be used to bring in experts to teach staff how to care for residents with mental illness or behavioral problems.” This redirection of funds would allow specialists to serve as trainers and troubleshooters, rather than as  consultants for individual residents.

Lombardo also called on nursing home administrators to support simple changes in their in-service training philosophies: “Administrators must realize the actions of all staff members in their facilities affect the mental health of residents either positively or negatively. Therefore, every person should attend training on mental and behavioral issues.”