Chronic Stress Among Older African Americans in the United States: How Coping Impacts Mental Health
By Dawne M. Mouzon
The older adult population is growing rapidly in the United States. By 2060, nearly 1 in 4 Americans will be 65 or older. This is an important trend because older adults in the United States face unique challenges related to the aging process, including high rates of poverty, health challenges, and social isolation. Many of these chronic stressors occur more frequently and have more severe consequences among older Black adults, who experience three times the rate of poverty, more housing instability, high rates of premature chronic health conditions, and both caregiving and financial challenges related to early disability and death of family members.
The use of effective coping strategies is one way in which older Black adults can manage chronic stress. Coping refers to the cognitive and/or behavioral strategies people use when exposed to challenging stressors. There are generally two broad categories of coping. Problem-focused coping refers to attempts at addressing the stressor itself, whether that involves efforts to remove the stressor altogether or attempts to reduce the impact of the stressor on one’s well-being. Emotion-focused coping, on the other hand, does not involve directly addressing the stressor but instead aims to reduce the negative emotions associated with the stressor.
In this study, I found that emotion-focused coping is a very effective coping approach for older Black Americans. Past research finds that emotion-focused coping is especially useful when people perceive a stressor to be uncontrollable in nature. The process of aging often carries multiple financial, social, and physical and mental health challenges, many of which occur earlier and have more severe consequences among older African Americans. I found that under high levels of chronic stress, older African American adults who accept the fact that a stressor has happened have lower levels of psychological distress than those who do not practice acceptance. Likewise, learning to live with a stressor is also an adaptive emotion-focused coping response for older African Americans experiencing high levels of chronic stress.
Religious coping is one problem-focused coping strategy that proves to be especially beneficial for the mental health of older African Americans experiencing high levels of chronic stress. At low levels of chronic stress, frequency of religious coping does not strongly matter for mental health. But as chronic stress reaches high levels, older African Americans who frequently pray or request prayer from others experience relatively low levels of distress while those who infrequently use prayer report increasingly higher levels of distress. This finding makes sense because religiosity has a rich cultural tradition within African American communities in the United States, fortifying African American people under macro-level stressors dating back to the periods of enslavement, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, all the way to the present day.
Rates of unmet mental health need are high among older Black Americans, in part due to lower access to high-quality health insurance and the lack of Black mental health providers who share the cultural understanding of their unique life circumstances. Given the important historical legacy of religion for older Black adults, both communities and churches can play an important role in providing both social support and promoting the use of effective strategies for coping with the stressors of aging.
Article Details
Chronic Stress, Coping, and Mental Health Among Older African Americans
Dawne M. Mouzon, PhD
First published online May 6, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/08982643221085805
Journal of Aging and Health
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