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Elderly in
Long-term Care setting suffer Depression
more than those cared for at home
Newswise — Elderly in a
long-term care setting are more likely to be
prescribed antidepressants and to
self-report depression compared to those in
a home-health care setting, according to a
study by social work students at Indiana
State University.
The study of 272
elders, with an average age of 81, examined
how often patients reported feeling
depressed and were prescribed
antidepressants at both a long-term care
facility and through a home-care agency in
west-central Indiana.
At the long-term care
facility, 30 percent of the elders in the
study reported feeling depressed, compared
with 11 percent who received care in their
homes through medical and social services.
The long-term care
facility also prescribed antidepressants to
more than half of the elders in the study
(62 percent) at some point after they were
admitted, compared to only a quarter of the
home-cared elders.
Jodi Shapuras and
Lindsay Egan, undergraduate students in the
social work program at ISU, conducted the
research at their internships as part of a
senior-level field practicum class.
“We are both interested
in working with the elderly population in
our careers, so we conducted this research
to get a better feel for the prevalence of
depression in those who need some level of
outside care,” said Shapuras of Mitchell,
Ind.
“As social workers, it
is important to understand the mental health
issues, such as depression, within the
different care settings.”
Shapuras and Egan said
they weren’t surprised by their findings.
“We actually
hypothesized that the long-term care
patients would utilize antidepressants more
and would self-report depression more,” said
Egan of Terre Haute, Ind.
“When an individual
moves to a long-term care facility, they
undergo a tremendous amount of changes. They
are no longer able to live independently and
are relying on others for care, and this
greatly affects how they feel about
themselves and the world around them.”
Shapuras added that in
the home-care setting, elders are still
residing within a familiar environment.
“They are still at home
and independently able to complete some
activities of daily living, such as bathing,
cooking or feeding themselves, whereas a
long-term care patient may not be able to do
all of these tasks,” Shapuras said.
Shapuras and Egan
presented the findings of their study,
“Comparison of Depression in Elders Who
Receive Home-Health Care to Elders Residing
in a Long-Term Care Facility,” at ISU’s 12th
annual Undergraduate and Graduate Research
Showcase, and received first place in the
undergraduate oral presentation division.
The researchers hope
that their findings will bring awareness to
the problem of depression in elderly needing
care, and to the degree to which
antidepressants are prescribed in the
long-term care setting.
“I would like to see
more effective alternative treatments
researched, as opposed to what seems in many
cases to be the automatic prescribing an
antidepressants,” Egan said.
Shapuras also would
like more research to be done in this area.
“It seems as though
medications are sometimes viewed as the
‘fix-all’ when depression becomes apparent,”
she said. “I hope to work in the field of
gerontology as a social worker and to make
some positive changes somewhere along the
line.”
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