Mental health articles

Forces influencing the mental health of the elderly

Phenomena throughout the world may impinge upon the mental health of the elderly directly and/or through mediating variables such as family care. For example, war and displacement may directly contribute to psychiatric morbidity, including psychoses,behavioral disturbances, substance abuse and suicide among the elderly and also limit the family'scapacity to care for its elders. Factors such asrural-urban migration will likely continue to indirectly impact elderly mental health by underminingfamily and social structures ensuring care for the elderly and traditional mechanisms for bufferingdistress, especially among those who are mentally ill.Of course, variables such as age, gender, income andculture (i.e. specific local realities) determine how changes affect caregivers and elderly. we show some of the main forces affecting the mental health of the elderly and the relationshipsamong them. Economic change, increasing rates of education among the young and urbanization are allvery closely interrelated, and we distinguish betweenthem mainly in order to organize information into subsections in this part of the paper. Family care ispresented both as a mediating variable, because it actsas a conduit through which the proposed forces influence mental health, as well as a predictor variable, since it also directly impacts the mental well-beingof the elderly. Although we know of no studies that have explored specifically the link between breakdownor lack of family care and poor mental health outcomes among the elderly, some researchers state that changes in family care and social support likelycontribute to depression and other types of minorpsychiatric morbidity. Both demographicchange and widowhood (as well as the other variables presented in the model) hold implications forlevels of family and social support. For the sake ofsimplicity, other critical variables do not appear. For example, migration (primarily of the young) is often a determinant of the family's ability tosupport their aged, but we assume it to be an integralcomponent of several forces in the model, includingeconomic change (i.e. industrialization), urbanization,the motive to gain education, and war and conflict.The following discussion examines the ways in whichthe forces in Fig. 1 act to influence the mental health of the elderly.

Tags: elderly, Health, mental, Mental health