Page No – 53-59
S. Venkatesan
All India Institute of Speech and Hearing, Mysore.
Anupama Ravindranath
Sri Venkateswara Unversity, Tirupati
.
This cross sectional study seeks to map the ground trends of depression in
institutionalized and non-institutionalized elderly in association with connected
socio-demographic variables. A demographic data sheet and 28-item General
Health Questionnaire was used to carry out individual interviews among the
elderly. The results indicate satisfactory psychometric qualities for the GHQ-28
in this tested sample for reliability and inter-correlations of its sub-scales. The
findings paint a rather grim picture of the most typical hypothetically affected
senior citizen of this sample as one who is a widowed institutionalized female
hailing from low socio economic status group with complaints of felt anxiety
and sleeplessness along with severe depression. This contrasts the much better
counterpart of the non-institutionalized aged familial male, preferably with the
spouse, from a high socio economic status, who scores consistently better
scores on all health dimensions as measured in this study. The results are
discussed in the light of the need and their implications for improving the quality
of life of the institutionalized elderly in the contemporary Indian society