The sustainability of resilience in older persons

Success breeds success? A mixed-methods study of the sustainability of resilience in older persons

The aim of the project is to investigate to what degree older adults who have previously recovered from a depression, remain resilient (i.e. free of depression) during the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition, we aim to investigate whether protective resources that were useful in the context of recovery from depression are also useful in the context of remaining free of depression during the Covid-19 pandemic. The project is an extension of an earlier qualitative study conducted in our research group. During this earlier study 25 semi-structured interviews were held among individuals who recovered from depression between May and December 2020. Between April and September of 2021 a second round of qualitative semi-structured interviews was conducted with 19 of the same participants. Our project, in addition, uses quantitative data derived from three large psychiatric cohorts collected in the Netherlands (NESDO, NESDA and NOCDA), which consists of various rounds of pre-pandemic data (2004 and onwards) as well as 15 measurements of during-pandemic data collected between April 2020 and July 2021.