A 2022 figure, and a last stage that is not only decline

In 2022, the essay notes, Statistics Korea reported that 17.5 percent of the country’s population was aged 65 or over, and that aging was proceeding faster than in many other countries. As that shift last, later life draws more public attention. The writer mentions Erik Erikson’s 1963 account of eight stages, in which the last is a time of ego integrity. Erikson is not the subject here. He is a reminder that later life has been thought of as a work of gathering a life together, even as physical and cognitive functions often lessen, and even as frequent change can bring withdrawal, unease, or anxiety.

Too often, the essay says, that unease was treated as a matter of an older person’s character, and systematic study lagged. In Korea, research on the mental health of older adults became more orderly only in the 1980s. Interest has since widened, the writer adds, to lonely death, to suicide, and to trauma.

From the presence or absence of illness to the capacity to cope

Mental health, in an older vocabulary, began as a word for whether a mental illness was present or not. The essay prefers a more recent, more positive use: a word for a person’s mental state, and, generally, for the capacity to cope well with the many stresses a life produces. A person who is mentally well, in this account, can still grow in intellect and in feeling, and can form relationships that satisfy both sides. Trouble in this sphere, the essay adds, reaches the body and the social life around the person, not only a private inward weather.

For older adults, mental health has also been described as receiving positive love and attention from people nearby, and as achieving what one wishes. That definition already points beyond a diagnosis. It asks whether a life in later years is still held by other people, and whether it still has tasks that can be met.

Depression, stigma, and a public question

The threat the essay keeps in view is depression that can follow a social slight. Negative public views can leave an older person with a sense of inferiority or of being left out, and that state of mind can deepen into a depressive mood that threatens late-life mental health. The writer notes that such trouble was once handled as a private psychological problem. Only when it became clear that a mental illness, or a disturbed state of mind, also touches other people and the social and economic world around the person did the subject draw more careful interest.

Among the sources the essay lists is C. H. Vogel’s 1987 paper on anxiety and depression among the elderly, in the Journal of Gerontological Nursing, and later Korean work on stress, life satisfaction, leisure, and social support. The argument the writer wants to keep does not depend on inventing a new clinical finding. It is that late-life mental health is no longer only the presence or absence of a disease, and no longer only one person’s temperament. In a country that is aging this quickly, depression and stress in later life are a public question, and they have to be read with the relationships and the stigma that surround them. The fuller Korean text is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. A student account of late-life mental health in a rapidly aging Korea, following depression and stress rather than a tour of developmental stages.

Last updated 15 November 2026