Baby Boomers: The Most Depressed Generation
The 79 million boomers alive today make up over a quarter of the entire American population. Last year, the oldest members of the generation turned 65. For the next 18 years, 10,000 boomers will turn 65 each day, according to the Pew Research Center. Today, the average life expectancy for women in America is 81 years old. For men, it is 76 years old. According to Gallup, the expected retirement age in the United States is 67. So, as Boomers enter into the retirement that precedes the end of their lives, will they find meaning and satisfaction as they age? Will they thrive, flourish, take a slow ride off into the sunset?
This is an enormously important question not just because of the implications it has on the happiness of real people, but also for the consequences it will have on society, social services, and our culture as a whole. As Pew points out, “By force of numbers alone, they almost certainly will redefine old age in America, just as they’ve made their mark on teen culture, young adult life and middle age.”
The baby boomers are becoming characterized by startlingly high rates of depression and pessimism. Boomers are more depressed and less satisfied with their lives than both those who are older and younger than them, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review in 2008.
Women, in particular, are suffering. In the American population generally, women tend to be more depressive than men, and this is true of the boomers as well. In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that between 1999 and 2004, rates of suicide increased by 20 percent for 45-to-54-year-olds, a far greater increase than that experienced in nearly every other age group. Among women who were 45-to-54-year-olds, the increase was a staggering 31 percent. Suicide aside, boomers have found another way to cope with their doldrums: according to the National Institute of Health, between 2002 and 2011, the number of illicit drugs users aged 50 to 59 tripled.
What is going on? This is a generation that is better educated, more successful, and has better access to health care than the generations that directly preceded it. This is the generation whose women benefitted from the gains of second wave feminism.
Experts on aging, depression, and happiness are at a loss for what is causing the boomers’ funk. One explanation is stress. “Much of the research is pointing to daily stress as a precipitator of their depression,” according to Donald A. Malone, Jr., the director of the Mood and Anxiety Clinic in the department of psychiatry and psychology at the Cleveland Clinic.
Read the whole thing at The Atlantic and Follow Emily on Twitter @EmEsfahaniSmith
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
“Experts on aging, depression, and happiness are at a loss for what is causing the boomers’ funk.”
They’re at a gain. Who must pay for them are at a loss.
Simple, they’re comming to the realization that they aren’t going to live forever. They are actually going to die someday. It’s all just,,,,, so unfair!
now control for political ideology to determine the effects of long term cognitive dissonance on mental health.
Guilt.
It’s an over-simplification, but Boomers (some Boomers, if not many or most) were smack in the middle of the Sexual Revolution, the Drug Culture, the generally “anything goes” whoopie-do of the late Sixties to the Eighties. Go figure.
The twits are slow to learn that if one sows the wind, ….
I am 73 and observed the boomers from their cradles to their first days in kindergarten and it was clear to all of us in the ” Silent Generation ” that a whole new era had come to the schoolyard. They were the biggest pack of whinners and tattletales ever to have come down the pike and were despised by everyone from the fourth grade up. They cursed and kicked their teachers ( in my case the teachers were nuns ) and their mothers came and berated those same teachers. They were regarded by their parents as special and their parents paid a high price for their blindness. As a whole they have chosen to be pessimists and seem to choose pessimists as friends. One wonders if as a group they have ever been truly thankful for anything. Old age is not for sissies but properly lived is a time of learning and joy. Maybe they will find something to be happy about other than the misfortunes of someone else.
First point (and most cynical):
Makes me wonder, after reading the article in The Atlantic, if this is just another ploy to get more tax payer dollars to fund the mental health industry.
Second point (and more hopeful):
Most individuals of all age groups that have a strong faith in God tend to be less depressed and more satisfied and grateful for their lives.
I’ll bet ANYTHING that many baby boomers are depressed because they were personally deeply involved in the hippie/environMENTAL/homosexual/ZPG/ animal rights/feminist/radical Leftist movements that baby boomers inaugurated in the 60s, and only now are realizing that the personal happiness and the heaven on earth that they were CERTAIN would result from their passionately held beliefs and energetic activism never materialized. They are being brought, late in life, face to face with the possibility that, hey, maybe their ideas were…WRONG?? That all that they worked and struggled for and WON didn’t bring them happiness? That they’d WASTED decades of their lives? As a conservative all my life, I didn’t buy into any of that,and have no regrets at age fifty something.
We sorely require a “Like” option…
Like.
Boomers are too far gone to ever realize they were (and are) wrong. Their quixotic quest for a consequence-free utopia will never end, and their realization that it may not happen in their lifetimes (sensible people, of course, know that it can never happen in any lifetime), is probably creating their funk. They will never consider that they themselves have failed. They are legends in their own minds and and believe they are the smartest people to have ever walked the planet.
My great grandmother worked helping the mentally impaired well into her 80s and was on a bowling team until she was almost 90. She spent time teaching us how to crochet, sew, bake, and make jam. She made stories up from the top of her head. She didn’t slow down until just before she died in her 90s. She was an inspiring women.
I look at some of my aging childless boomer friends who now treat a dog or a couple of cats as substitute family and shudder at the long term prospects for the mental well being of those poor animals.
Ive been depressed since nov. 6th.
Being part of the baby boomer generations my wife and I looked at each other at one point and said “when did this happen?”. I didn’t really have any issues aging but when my wife turned 55 she had a really hard time coming to terms with her age and I noticed that out in public she’d fib about out. I heard about and bought her a book that I thought would help her called “Borderless Broads, New Adventures for the Midlife Woman” by Morgana Morgaine. You can check her out and get the book right from her website, http://www.morganamorgaine.com/. She raves about the book and a few of her friends have read it too. Ever since she finished reading I’ve noticed that she’s much more comfortable and confident in her herself. Thanks for the article!