This podcast features an interview with social worker Felicity Chapman.

Felicity combines a private practice of counselling, training and consulting as well as being a sessional lecturer and tutor at the University of Adelaide, in their Graduate Program of Counselling and Psychotherapy.

The focus of our interview is her landmark book on counselling and psychotherapy with older people in care. You can find all the details on her website.

The book is a great primer, equally valuable for a beginner or seasoned therapist. It is packed with helpful clinical vignettes, as well as practical tools for assessment and critical reflection.

Felicity provides a map that helps navigate the complex terrain between families, clients, aged care homes and the cultures in which they are anchored.

Just as important the book confronts the medicalisation of ageing, acknowledges psychotherapy as both an art and a technology, and privileges the voices of older people in how they would like to be engaged with and related to.

It was a pleasure to interview Felicity. We discussed how she got into working with older people, and the connections she draws between politics, policy, psychology and social work.

She is also engaged in ongoing aged care advocacy work with the SA Branch of the AASW.

We pondered the position of older people in our culture, our changing priorities as we grow older and we dreamt a little about the kind of aged care home we would like to live in.

As Felicity said –she is constantly looking for the “earthy” connection.