Cross-sectional differences in the level of depression for elderly people in Europe

Abstract

Depression is the most prevailing mental health problem nowadays and researchers expect it to deepen especially in most developed countries due to constantly aging population. This development would pose extreme financial burden on public finance. The SHARE project provides a huge variety of data sets including a mental health module used to form the 12-item EURO-D scale, which serves as a common metrics for depressions. However, in wave 7 this module includes respondents from only 12 countries. Consequently, this paper aims to construct data-driven indices reflecting the level of depression in Europe. We employ factor analysis and as a result, we derive two latent variables. High positive values of the first one indicate lack of depression, while high positive values of the second variable might be indicative for presence of serious depressive symptoms. We then inspect cross-national differences in terms of these two latent variables. Our major findings suggest that geographic location tends to have some effect on the presence of depressive symptoms among elderly people in Europe.