People who have reached age 65 and still have living parents are more likely to suffer depressive symptoms than their peers whose parents have died, a new study suggests.
Further, adult children who may have been abused or neglected by their parents are especially vulnerable—both when at least one parent is alive, and when a parent dies.
“Older adults adjust fairly well to the death of a parent, especially a parent who lived a full life,” says Deborah Carr, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. “But that’s if they had a close, warm, supportive relationship with the parent. But if they had a difficult childhood and were neglected emotionally, they have a much tougher time, both when the parent is alive and when the parent dies.”
The study is based on an analysis of data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), an ongoing study of 10,317 men and women who graduated from high schools in Wisconsin in 1957. The participants in that study have been interviewed at ages 36, 54, 65, and 72. Carr’s analysis focuses on the 6,140 people interviewed at age 65 in 2004.
Participants were asked whether their parents were alive; about what kind of relationship they had with their parents; and about their own their own mental health, such as, “How often in the past week have you felt tired, sad, or blue?”
“It’s important to understand that we’re talking about depressive symptoms such as sadness—not clinical depression, which is a medical diagnosis,” Carr says.
The findings held some surprises, Carr says.
“I expected people with two living parents to be the best off in mental health terms. But, no matter how many ways I ran the models, people with two living parents had more sadness than people with one, and people with one living parent had more sadness than people whose parents had died.”
