How Aging Can Affect a Senior's Mental Health

Growing older has its benefits: life experience, knowledge and perspective. But sometimes, aging brings stressors, too, increasing your mom or dad’s risk of depression.

Understanding Your Senior’s Risk of Depression

Various life events and factors influence your loved one’s mental and emotional health. Chronic illness, loss of a spouse or partner and changes in physical abilities can lead to social isolation and depression.

Untreated depression may have consequences for mental and physical health. It’s important to know the warning signs for depression in seniors, including:

• Mood swings
• Loss of appetite or overeating
• Trouble sleeping or oversleeping
• Increased sense of worry, stress, anger, irritability and aggression
• Poor concentration
• Memory loss
• Headaches
• Digestive issues
• Substance abuse
• Hallucinations
• Erratic behavior

The Importance of Positivity

Negative thinking can be a hard habit to break. First, it’s important to identify your loved one’s negative thinking patterns, such as:

• Perfectionism: This involves setting extremely high standards that aren’t attainable, thus setting your parent up for failure.
• Catastrophizing: Assuming the worst-case scenario will occur without evidence might cause your mom or dad’s negativity to snowball.
• Blaming: Your loved one may find someone or something to blame for their circumstances and not take accountability for themselves.
• Polarizing: This negative thinking only allows your mom or dad to see a situation as good or bad.

Learning to reframe those thought patterns can go a long way toward improving your parent’s depressive symptoms and helping them enjoy their life.

Discuss practicing gratitude to remind your senior of the good things around them. Your mom or dad could say what they’re grateful for aloud or write it down in a journal once daily.

Uplifting others is another way to spread positivity and socialize. Being around people with positive attitudes gives your parent perspective when they’re not feeling their best.

How You Can Help Your Loved One with Their Depression

Here are some tips to help your parent cope with symptoms of depression:

• Create a weekly schedule to eliminate the guesswork of daily activities and set goals.
• Work with other family and friends to provide regular socialization in person or over the phone.
• Encourage your mom or dad to take up a new hobby or revisit an old one.
• Assign them a task or chore to keep them focused and give them purpose and responsibility. That could include caring for a pet, watering plants or cleaning a certain part of the house.
• Work together to manage their medications to ensure your parent takes their proper dosage on time.
• Make sure your mom or dad is eating right and getting daily exercise.

Senior Living Communities at Embassy Healthcare

Living with others with similar life experiences can create a sense of camaraderie and companionship for your loved one. A senior living community also offers ample opportunities for socialization and making new friends, which reduces your mom or dad’s risk of isolation and depression. Independent living facilities offer robust activity schedules, events and outings, too.

Call 216-378-2050 to learn more about our services.