Older adults in Puerto Rico who lost food security, housing stability, and financial resources during Hurricane María showed measurable associations between the breadth of those losses and subsequent mental health burden. Losses accumulated across multiple domains rather than occurring in isolation, suggesting that the total load, not any single deprivation, drives psychological outcomes. Disaster exposure in later life functions as a durable determinant of wellbeing well beyond the acute event.
Key Points
- Hurricane María stripped older adults of food, housing, and finances
- Loss across multiple domains tracked with worse mental health outcomes
- Late-life disaster exposure carries psychological consequences long after recovery
Longevity Analysis
Sustained deprivation of basic resources keeps the stress response elevated for months or years, a state that degrades sleep architecture, immune surveillance, and cardiovascular regulation in populations already operating with narrower physiological reserve. The practical lever in older adults is removing the ongoing interference — restoring stable housing, reliable nutrition, and financial predictability — before any individual-level intervention can hold. Distress after a disaster is frequently misread as inevitable aging or isolated depression, when it reflects an environment that has not yet been repaired.
Original published by SAGE Research on Aging, by Kyeongmo Kim, Denise Burnette, Seon Kim1School of Social Work, 6889Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia, USA2Department of Social Welfare, Sunchon National University, Suncheon, Jeollanam-do, South Korea.