While caregiving can be meaningful and rewarding at manageable levels, those who spend more than 20 hours a week delivering unpaid care to others have poorer mental health outcomes, a McGill study has found.

However, the researchers also found that the provision of social support to high-intensity caregivers mitigates negative impacts.

“Programs that connect intensive caregivers to emotional, informational and practical support (respite care, caregiver support groups, community services) could make a real difference,” said Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, Professor and Chair of the Department of Equity, Ethics and Policy and senior author of the study.

“Policies that focus solely on who is a caregiver miss the point: how much someone is caregiving matters enormously for their well-being,” Quesnel-Vallée said.

“Factors we often assume matter (gender, income, education, where you live) did not significantly change how caregiving affected mental health once intensity was taken into account,” she added.

The team used data from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA), a large, nationally representative cohort of over 51,000 Canadians ages 45-85 at baseline. The study followed them over three time points, roughly from 2011 to 2021.

The researchers categorized the participants into four groups (non-caregiver, low, moderate, intensive) and tested whether factors like gender, income, education and social support affected the relationship between the participants’ caregiving activities and their mental health. They also controlled for stable personal characteristics that might otherwise distort results, such as personality or early-life health issues.

“Intensive caregivers (who spent more than 20 hours a week on caregiving) had worse mental health – lower life satisfaction and more depressive symptoms – while low-intensity caregivers (under 10 hours a week) actually reported higher life satisfaction than non-caregivers,” Quesnel-Vallée summarized.

The research also showed that, for high-intensity caregivers, the only factor that buffered against the mental health toll of caregiving was how much social support they reported receiving.

The researchers maintain that, given that more Canadians will take on unpaid caregiving roles in the future due to the country’s aging population, the results have practical implications for policymaking.

For Zilin Li, a postdoctoral researcher in the Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making and lead author of the study, it’s important that policymakers highlight the positive aspects of caregiving in offering support.

“Policies should invest in strengths-based supports that empower caregivers through training and recognition of their skills and values,” she said.

The researchers said they hope future research can track the caregiving journey and its long-term mental health impacts in more comprehensive ways, identify the types of caregiving support that would be most beneficial and collect data on caregivers under 45, who were not included in the CLSA.

“Social disparities in associations between informal caregiving intensity and mental health: Evidence from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging”, by Zilin Li, Isabelle Vedel and Amélie Quesnel-Vallée was published in Social Science & Medicine.

This research was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.