[Seniors' precariousness, social factors hindering access to care].

The precarity of the elderly is a threat that becomes more and more consistent when diseases, disabilities and handicaps become established. Access to care becomes an imperative. The difficulties of implementing palliative and support measures lead to growing precariousness.

[Understanding the suffering of the elderly].

Alzheimer's disease is an organic disease of the brain affecting mainly elderly people. Drawing on patients' imaginations on a daily basis or art therapy allow them, despite the cognitive impairments, to construct symbolic objects, analogues, to help give back meaning to their life. If the use of symbolisation when evoking the real object is not possible, the meaning is therefore constructed using the figurative dimension, an analogue substituting the lost and absent object, too painful to evoke again.

[Old age in Medieval times].

Europe in the Middle Ages had no experience of gerontology as we know it today. The categorisation of old age was based on symbolic relationships with the world, inherited from Antiquity, and resulted in an ambivalent image of this age. Our knowledge in the area is derived mainly from fiction, from scholarly texts of a philosophical, moralising or medical nature, each interacting with the other.

[The reconstruction of meaning in dementia].

Dementia brings about progressive cognitive deterioration, combining memory problems, language difficulties and thought disorders. While there is currently no treatment for the organic disorders causing the dementia, help can be given to patients to slow down the regressive processes. Psychological mediations exist to support patients in their efforts to make sense of their environment.