ABSTRACT
Ageism can be depressing to read and write about. It is not pleasant to contemplate evidence about depressed and at times suicidal young people unable to develop adult identities, about middle aged people unimaginatively employed due to inane age-related prejudice or about energetic mature people on the scrapheap. However we have come to realise that the underlying forces which have made ageism into something of a public issue in the early twenty-first century are on the whole benign ones, since they include greater wealth, longer lives and heightened concern for injustice. We have been converted from worried pessimists to concerned and fascinated optimists.
