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Creativity and Healthy Ageing

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Healthy Aging

Abstract

The encouragement and facilitation of human creativity is an important component of healthy ageing. Health care providers, health care facilities and public policy should promote creativity as a method of promoting good health across the age spectrum and especially for those who are older. While relatively neglected as important elements of health and wellbeing, the key to benefitting from creativity and aesthetics as liberating and supportive forces in later life is to avoid in the first instance circumscribing creativity to engagement with participatory arts. This is not to diminish the potency of supporting engagement with the arts, culture and leisure throughout the lifespan, an aspect of life which is associated with increased well-being but which may exercise its impact through a complex web of mechanisms, including social participation. The wider elements of creativity may be fostered through a broader approach to creativities, including those which provide opportunities for creative thinking, reflection and learning through mechanisms such as the University of the Third Age, or the developing movement of Age-Friendly Universities (Murray A, O’Neill D. Health-care equity--for all generations? Lancet. 2009;373(9660):299).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Ageing, Neuroscience and the Humanities, Trinity Centre for Health Sciences, Trinity College Dublin & Tallaght University Hospital, Dublin, Ireland

    Desmond O’Neill

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  1. Desmond O’Neill
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Correspondence to Desmond O’Neill .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center on Aging and Departments of Family Medicine and Medicine, University of Connecticut School of Medicine, Farmington, CT, USA

    Patrick P. Coll

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O’Neill, D. (2019). Creativity and Healthy Ageing. In: Coll, P. (eds) Healthy Aging. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06200-2_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06200-2_27

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-06199-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-06200-2

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