Association of depression with widowhood, loneliness, and social non-participation among older women in India

Background

Widowhood is a disastrous incident occurring at any stage of life for surviving oneself particularly the older women having critical reflexes on their physical, emotional and as well as socio-economic well-bring. Living alone and being cornered to home may also have serious repercussions on psychological health conditions of geriatric population, a public health concern in recent times.The main essence of this present study was to investigate the impact of widowhood, loneliness and social non-participation on older women depression in Indian context.

Methods

Data for the present study were obtained from the first wave of the Longitudinal Ageing Study in India (LASI), conducted during 2017–2018. A total of 15,559 older adult women were availed for this present study. Descriptive analyses, association studies and finally multinominal logistic regression analyses were performed to fulfill the study objectives.

Result

Currently, 5 % of total study participant’s suffered from depression for most of the times. Findings suggested that widowhood is a catastrophic event giving rise to depression for most of the old women in their later life. With this, living alone in old age period also had a great impact on the prevalence of depression. Preponderance of older women depression is also found among those, not getting involved any social events.

Conclusion

This study suggested that to reduce the prevalence of older women depression, targeted interventions in the form of psychological counseling, screening services and community involvement are very much needed.