Unpaid carers pay high price for devotion to family members
LONDON: Evidence shows women who take on informal caregiver roles for other adults are more likely to develop depressive symptoms, and an Australian study has found a similar increased risk for men.
Researchers say most studies investigating the link between informal care-giving – providing unpaid care for an older adult or person with a disability, mental illness or health condition – and depressive symptoms have been done on women, so they used data from long-term men’s health study to investigate how becoming a caregiver affected men’s depressive symptoms over time.
They found men who became caregivers went on to report more depressive symptoms two years later than those who were not caregivers.
