Older adults and issues of depressive symptoms and alcohol use: Gender disparities in mental health

Although it was believed for decades that women suffer from more mental illness than men, more recent evidence suggests that both sexes suffer equally but from different disorders. Women have higher rates of depression and anxiety while men have higher rates of substance abuse and antisocial disorders. The purpose of this research is to examine gender differentials in trajectories of mental health and to assess the extent to which these differences can be accounted for by various social structural, behavioral, psychosocial, childhood, and other health factors. This research will include an extensive set of covariates, including childhood background factors, which have not been used to examine gender differentials in mental heath, yet have been consistently linked to adult health. The data come from seven waves (1992-2004) of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is a U.S. nationally representative panel study of health, retirement, and aging sponsored by the National Institute on Aging. Mental health is assessed with two outcomes. Depressive symptoms are measured with the CES-D scale. Alcohol use will be a continuous variable composed from two questions: how many days a week a person drinks and how many drinks respondents have on those days. Analyses show there are gender differences in the initial level of alcohol use and depressive symptoms, as well as gender differences in changes over time. This research improves upon past research by using latent growth curve analyses to test findings about gender disparities in mental health in older adults.