End-of-life care and depression

ABSTRACT

The time around the death of a parent may be particularly stressful. The existing literature provides mixed evidence on the effects of the death of a parent on the caring effort and mental health conditions of adult children. By exploiting longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), we study adult children’s provision of care and mental health before and after the death of their mother. We pinpoint the time of death of the mother and estimate its impact by following an event study approach, accounting for differences in Long Term Care (LTC) systems and social norms across Europe. Our findings show that caregiving increases before mother’s death, and especially for women and in low LTC spending countries. Depression symptoms increase significantly in the pooled sample and more so for women. Our interpretation is that adult children (typically daughters) must step in to guarantee care when this is scarcely provided by the public welfare system. The combination of care burden and grief for the loss of the mother negatively affects daughters’ mental health.

KEYWORDS:

• Event study
• SHARE
• mental health
• long term care

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• I10
• J14

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ This paper uses data from SHARE Waves 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 (DOIs: 10.6103/SHARE.w1.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w2.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w3.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w4.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w5.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w6.710, 10.6103/SHARE.w7.711), see (Börsch-Supan et al. 2013) for methodological details. The SHARE data collection has been funded by the European Commission through FP5 (QLK6-CT-2001-00360), FP6 (SHARE-I3: RII-CT-2006-062193, COMPARE: CIT5-CT-2005-028857, SHARELIFE: CIT4-CT-2006-028812), FP7 (SHARE-PREP: GA N°211909, SHARE-LEAP: GA N°227822, SHARE M4: GA N°261982, DASISH: GA N°283646) and Horizon 2020 (SHARE-DEV3: GA N°676536, SHARE-COHESION: GA N°870628, SERISS: GA N°654221, SSHOC: GA N°823782) and by DG Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion. Additional funding from the German Ministry of Education and Research, the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Institute on Ageing (U01_AG09740-13S2, P01_AG005842, P01_AG08291, P30_AG12815, R21_AG025169, Y1-AG-4553-01, IAG_BSR06-11, OGHA_04-064, HHSN271201300071C) and from various national funding sources is gratefully acknowledged.

SHARE data are permanently available to the scientific community upon registration through the wwww.share-project.org website.

² See the Online Appendix for more details.