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Depression Among Blacks During Late Life: Examining Within-Group Variations

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Prevention of Late-Life Depression

Part of the book series: Aging Medicine ((AGME,volume 9))

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Abstract

Depression is one of the most prevalent mental health disorders experienced during late life. A life course perspective provides a useful frame to understand depressive patterns, highlighting pivotal periods of mental health vulnerability during important age-linked life stages. Research on Blacks during late life commonly treats Blacks as a monolithic group, diminishing the returns that a life course perspective can offer and perhaps masking within-group variations. This chapter provides a review of the extant literature on depression prevalence and depressive symptoms among African Americans and US- and foreign-born Caribbean Blacks with a focus on the late-life period. We conduct an analysis of lifetime major depressive episode, lifetime major depressive disorder, and depressive symptoms for each group globally and disaggregated by gender. The results show variations in prevalence rates and symptom patterns for each group as well as interactions between ethnicity, nativity, and gender. Findings illustrate the importance of targeted and tailored research, practice, and policy that can accommodate the variations within aging Black subgroups and their changing patterns of mental health vulnerability and advantage over the adult life course.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A challenge in ascertaining where the field stands in current late life research in mental health is a lack of a clear partitioning of life course periods. For example, late late life can be defined as those aged 75 years and older, 80 years and older, or 85 years and older [7, 19], which makes it difficult to compare studies.

  2. 2.

    These results compare prevalence rates between the two oldest groups in each study, for example, Blazer et al. [6], 60 to 74 years/75 years or older; Byers et al. [18], 75 to 84 years/85 years or older; Murrell et al. [19], 65 to 74 years/75 years or older; Steffens et al. [20], 75 to 84 years/85 years or older; and Steffens et al. [17], 80 to 89 years/90 years or older.

  3. 3.

    This study used the Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS-10) and the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE, 30 point). They lowered the cognitive impairment to 20 points to take “into account potential cross-cultural differences in MMSE distributions” (p. 24), which may have produced higher prevalence rates.

  4. 4.

    Figures reported in crude non age-adjusted rates taken from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System

  5. 5.

    There were a few cells in our depressive symptom by ethnicity and gender analysis that had fewer than 25 observations; this occurred exclusively for observations during the late life period for the US-born Caribbean Black sample. Specifically for the early late-life period (55–64 years): US-born Caribbean Black male (n = 10) and US-born Caribbean Black female (n = 11). For the late life period (65–74 years): US-born Caribbean Black male (n = 10) and US-born Caribbean Black female (n = 8). For the late late life period (75 years or older): US-born Caribbean Black male (n = 1) and US-born Caribbean Black female (n = 5).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, 2112 Art-Sociology Building, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Shanna Brewton-Tiayon M.A.

  2. School of Social Work, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Daphne C. Watkins Ph.D.

  3. Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Niki Matusko M.A. & James S. Jackson Ph.D.

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  1. Shanna Brewton-Tiayon M.A.
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  2. Daphne C. Watkins Ph.D.
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  3. Niki Matusko M.A.
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  4. James S. Jackson Ph.D.
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Correspondence to Shanna Brewton-Tiayon M.A. .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School Boston, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Olivia I. Okereke

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Brewton-Tiayon, S., Watkins, D.C., Matusko, N., Jackson, J.S. (2015). Depression Among Blacks During Late Life: Examining Within-Group Variations. In: Okereke, O. (eds) Prevention of Late-Life Depression. Aging Medicine, vol 9. Humana Press, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16045-0_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16045-0_10

  • Publisher Name: Humana Press, Cham

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