Framing the narrative of frailty differently will help to promote wellbeing

Dr Shibley Rahman is currently an academic physician in dementia and frailty. His contribution on the diagnosis of behavioural frontal frontotemporal dementia, published while he was a M.B./Ph.D. student at Cambridge in 1999, is considered widely to be an important contribution to the field even cited in the Oxford Textbook of Medicine. He has a passionate interest in rights-based approaches which he accrued as part of his postgraduate legal training. He tweets at @dr_shibley.

It’s great that frailty as a ‘brand’ is getting so much publicity, but is it all the right kind of publicity? For example, “Our treatment of the frail elderly is a national scandal”, Sunday Express, 8 March 2011. (cited in Manthorpe and Iliffe, 2015)

But some of the copy has been to generate a “moral panic”, defined as a feeling of fear spread among a large number of people that some evil threatens the well-being of society.