Abstract:
Depression is a common mental health problem among the elderly. The elderly are often faced with degeneration from the aging process and life crises. If they have limited capacities for adaptation or use inappropriate defensive styles that would lead to depression in the elderly. The study aimed to explore the prevalence of depression, defense styles, and related factors among the elderly in senior club at public health center 7 in Bangkok, Thailand. Data were consecutively collected from 129 elderly in senior club at public health center 7 in Bangkok. They were asked to complete the set of questionnaires, including ; the Defense Styles Questionnaire60 (DSQ60), Thai Geriatric Depression Scale (TGDS30), Social Activities Participation of Elder, the 1 Year Life Event Question, and Chula Activities of Daily Living Index (Chula ADL Index). Depression was found in 9.3% of the participants. The most frequently utilized defensive styles were adaptive defense mechanisms, especially, altruism and sublimation. These adaptive defense mechanisms also had a negative correlation with depression. Male gender, history of psychiatric disease, moderately dependency level of the instrumental activity of daily living (IADL), moderate to high level of stress in the economy, high-stress level on social facet, frequent use of passiveaggression or reaction formation defensive styles, and rarely using of sublimation could statistically significant predict depression for these samples. The onetenth proportion of the elderly in this study had depression, which is comparable to the previous reports. Almost all of them used adaptive defense styles which also decreased the risk of depression. Recent psychosocial stressors and a history of depression should be screened, and promoting adaptive defensive styles would be helpful for the prevention of depression in caring for the elderly at the senior club.