A Study On The Effect Of Family Support On Mental Health Of The Elderly

In the population ageing context,the proportion of elderly people in China is rising.With the basic guarantee of material endowment,the mental health of the elderly is becoming more and more prominent,so the research on the mental condition of the elderly is paid more and more attention.The family supporting is one of the major old-age care methods in today's society.This article measures the impact of family support on the mental health of the elderly by these three indicators:family members' daytime care for the elderly,financial support from the descendants,and the spiritual consolation for the elderly from the descendant who do not live with the elderly.This article takes the life satisfaction,the degree of depression of the elderly and the cognitive condition of the elderly as indicators to measure the mental state of the elderly,and starts with taking life satisfaction as the main characteristic variable of the elderly's mental health state,and makes regression analysis of the CHARLS-related data by OLS model.At the same time,the article uses cognitive condition and mental depression indicator to test the robustness,and concludes that the family supporting take a positive and significant effect on the mental health of the elderly.In addition,this article has further studied the effect of social activities on family support factors affecting the elderly's life satisfaction.Through constructing model to analyze,it can be concluded that elderly people participating in social activities have different degrees of alternative effects on the influence of economic support and spiritual consolation to the elderly life satisfaction.Finally,this article puts forward some opinions on how to improve the mental health of the elderly from the aspects of family informal support and national policy guidance:1.Family members should pay more attention to the day-to-day life,spiritual conditions and social behaviors of the elderly;2.The country should improve the environment affecting the mental health of the elderly through three aspects:the establishment of the tax and other economic policies,the establishment of the social security system for the elderly and the improvement of the system of social participation of the elderly.