Being a caregiver to an aging parent or spouse can be stressful, but a new study calls into question the notion that it is a risk factor for depression. The study found that depression in adult caregivers is mostly driven by having a loved one experiencing serious health problems, while becoming a caregiver is associated with fewer symptoms of depression.
“Decades of research on this topic indicate that there are positive and negative aspects to being a caregiver. It’s widely assumed the negatives far outweigh the positives, that caregiving is a chronic stressor and that it contributes to worse health and well-being. But the evidence doesn’t always bear that out,”
said Sae Hwang Han, an assistant professor in the human development and family sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.
Deceptive Comparisons
According to recent research, caregivers live longer lives than non-caregivers, and many caregivers regard caring as a good experience that provides them meaning and purpose. These discrepancies prompted Han to conduct the investigation.
“Most previous studies start by identifying caregivers and compare their well-being to noncaregivers. But having a loved one experience a serious health problem in later life is itself a very depressing event,”
Han said.
It’s no surprise that these studies found a higher risk of depression in caregivers compared to non-caregivers, who frequently do not have major health issues in the family. That is a deceptive comparison, just as comparing the well-being of someone undergoing chemotherapy to that of someone who does not have cancer is.
Protective Caregiving
Han followed a group of over-50 adult children with a living mother. He observed changes in their mental health when some of the moms became disabled or cognitively impaired, and the adult children took on the role of caregivers.
Han discovered that adult children got more depressed when their moms’ health deteriorated but that becoming a caretaker did not worsen their depression.
“Rather, I found that caregiving alleviated the extent to which adult children became depressed in response to their mothers’ health problems, suggesting that there may be something protective about being able to help others we care about,”
Han said. A 2021 study by Han and colleagues found that spouses providing caregiving to their partners saw similar effects.
One in Five
One in every five Americans provides care to an adult with health and functional requirements, and over half of persons over 50 are caregivers to older folks. According to Han, many people can anticipate becoming caregivers at some point in their life.
While emphasizing the importance of social and policy interventions that continue to support caregivers, Han also says that this role does not have to be a source of dread and depression.
“There is no disputing that caregiving can be a very stressful experience,” he said. “But some stressful experiences also make you more resilient and help you grow.”
The work was funded by the University of Texas at Austin’s Center on Aging and Population Sciences, the Population Research Center, the National Institute on Aging, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
Reference:
- Han SH. Revisiting the caregiver stress process: Does family caregiving really lead to worse mental health outcomes?. Adv Life Course Res. 2023; 58:100579. doi:10.1016/j.alcr.2023.100579