Many studies (eg, die, good guy 2014, White Flower and Oswald 2009) claim that mental health follows a U-shape in which mental health declines with a nadir in midlife and then increases as people age.However, a recent study Deckard & Millau (2022) It was found that mental health may improve to a great extent throughout a person’s life, until the end of life.
This finding is based on data from a panel study of US income dynamics (PSID), the German socio-economic group (soup) and Dutch Social Science Longitudinal Internet Research (Alice) panel dataset. PSID data were measured using the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K-6) measures mental health; the German data use the Mental Component Summary scale (Control System) calculated from the answers to the SF-12v2 questionnaire to measure mental health, the Dutch data use the 5-question version of the Mental Health Checklist (MHI-5).
The graph below shows trends in mental health scores by age for several different population groups. In the graph, higher scores mean better mental health.
The authors summarize their findings as follows:
While a large body of literature suggests that age distributions for mental health may be U-shaped, we found no evidence of a U-shape. Instead, our results suggest that the relationship between mental health and age may be inverted U-shaped, with individuals experiencing higher mental health at some point in their lifetime. This finding is highly socially relevant, as it suggests that young and old people may be particularly vulnerable to mental health problems.
In statistical analysis, the study did find that the second derivative of mental health with age was negative (i.e. inverted U-shaped). Looking at the raw data, however, mental health in general seems to improve over time and only really decline towards the end of life. In short, for our young people who experience mental health problems, the data show that for many of them, mental health problems may improve over time.
