Stress and Depression among Mothers of Children with Mental Retardation

Child's disability has a profound impact on parent's functioning especially mothers. Mothers are most distressed, and this stress shows itself in the form of depression and other psychological problems and causes mother's function or performance to drop. The present research endeavor was aimed to study the relationship of different stressors with depression among mothers of children with mental retardation. The sample consisted of 38 mothers of mentally retarded children drawn from three institutes of Srinagar city working for these children. The results of the study revealed that there is a significant positive correlation between different stresses (viz. daily care stress, family emotional stress, social stress, and financial stress) and depression.