When Society Feels Unstable: National Resilience, Depression, Gender, and Life Satisfaction Among Filipino Emerging Adults
Article information
Cleofas, J. V. (2024). Gender, society and mental health: The moderated mediating role of depression and gender on national resilience and life satisfaction among emerging adults. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 33(3), 660–670. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.13272
What this study is about
This study asks a question that is often missed in mental health conversations: How does the condition of society affect young people’s mental health and satisfaction with life?
The paper focuses on Filipino emerging adults, or young people aged 18–29. This life stage is often marked by identity formation, uncertainty, career preparation, relationship changes, growing independence, and future planning. But emerging adulthood does not happen in a vacuum. Young people form their lives within larger social and political environments.
The study examined three main variables:
- National resilience — how much young people feel that their society is cohesive, trustworthy, just, and able to withstand crises.
- Depression — depressive symptoms such as negative affect, fatigue, and feelings of worthlessness.
- Life satisfaction — how satisfied people are with their lives overall.
The study also examined gender, measured as sex assigned at birth, to see whether these relationships were different for males and females.
Why this matters
The paper starts from the idea that mental health is not only personal. It is also social and political.
In recent years, young people have lived through major human security threats: the COVID-19 pandemic, climate-related disasters, wars, political unrest, corruption, disinformation, and weakening trust in public institutions. These events shape how safe, hopeful, and supported people feel in their society.
For nurses and mental health professionals, this matters because mental health care cannot stop at individual symptoms. If political instability, social injustice, and weak public trust affect mental wellbeing, then nurses also have a role in advocacy, policy engagement, and human rights-based mental health promotion.
The theoretical lens
The study uses two main theoretical ideas.
The first is the compensatory model of resiliency. This model suggests that promotive factors can protect people from risks. In this study, national resilience is treated as a promotive social resource. It may help young people feel less depressed and more satisfied with life.
The second is a gendered lens to resilience. This lens argues that resilience is not experienced equally by everyone. Men and women live within gendered societies, where expectations, resources, burdens, and opportunities are unequally distributed. For example, women may carry more reproductive, caregiving, and emotional labor, while political life and national identity are often culturally coded in masculine ways.
This means that national resilience may not benefit everyone equally, and depression may not affect everyone’s life satisfaction in the same way.
What the researcher did
This was a cross-sectional moderated mediation study involving 1,020 Filipino emerging adult undergraduate students aged 18–29 living in urban areas of the Greater Manila Area. Data were collected through an online survey during the third quarter of 2022, after the national election period and during the reopening of the Philippine economy after COVID-19 restrictions.
The study used three tools:
- the National Resilience Scale short version / NR-13;
- the depression component of the Kessler Psychological Distress Scale / K10; and
- the Satisfaction with Life Scale / SWLS.
The conceptual model in Figure 1 on page 4 shows the main idea: national resilience may predict life satisfaction directly and indirectly through depression, while gender may change the strength of these relationships.
What the study found
1) National resilience, depression, and life satisfaction were connected
The study found that the three key variables were significantly related.
Higher national resilience was linked to higher life satisfaction. Higher national resilience was also linked to lower depression. Meanwhile, higher depression was linked to lower life satisfaction.
In plain language: young people who saw their society as more resilient tended to feel less depressed and more satisfied with life.
2) National resilience predicted better life satisfaction
The study found that national resilience positively predicted life satisfaction. This suggests that when young people feel that their society has solidarity, justice, trust, and the capacity to face crises, they may evaluate their own lives more positively.
This is an important public mental health finding. Life satisfaction is not only shaped by personal achievement, family support, or individual optimism. It can also be shaped by whether society itself feels stable, fair, and trustworthy.
3) National resilience predicted lower depression
The study also found that national resilience negatively predicted depression. In other words, young people with higher perceptions of national resilience reported fewer depressive symptoms.
This supports the idea that mental health is connected to public life. If people feel that their country can respond to crises, protect citizens, and maintain social cohesion, this may reduce psychological distress.
4) Depression predicted lower life satisfaction
Depression had a strong negative relationship with life satisfaction. This means that young people with more depressive symptoms tended to feel less satisfied with life.
This finding is expected, but still important. During emerging adulthood, depression can disrupt identity formation, future planning, relationships, motivation, and one’s sense that life is moving in a meaningful direction.
5) Depression partly explained the national resilience–life satisfaction link
The mediation analysis showed that depression partially mediated the relationship between national resilience and life satisfaction. Specifically, depression explained 15.78% of this relationship.
In simple terms:
Higher national resilience → lower depression → higher life satisfaction.
This means that national resilience may improve life satisfaction partly because it helps reduce depressive symptoms. However, the mediation was only partial, meaning national resilience may also support life satisfaction through other pathways, such as hope, trust, belonging, social identity, perceived safety, or optimism about the future.
6) Gender changed the relationships
The study found two important gender moderation effects.
First, being male strengthened the positive relationship between national resilience and life satisfaction. This means national resilience appeared to translate more strongly into life satisfaction among male respondents.
Second, being female strengthened the negative relationship between depression and life satisfaction. This means depressive symptoms appeared to have a stronger harmful effect on life satisfaction among female respondents.
The slope plots in Figure 2 on page 7 show these patterns visually: the national resilience–life satisfaction line rises more steeply for males, while the depression–life satisfaction line declines more steeply for females.
Why gender matters here
The paper argues that these gender differences should not be treated as simple biological differences. They reflect how society is organized.
National resilience may benefit males more because nation-building, public life, patriotism, political participation, and institutional trust are often historically and culturally associated with masculinity. If men are more centered in public and political life, they may gain more psychological benefit from feeling that the nation is resilient.
Meanwhile, depression may more strongly reduce life satisfaction among females because women often face gendered burdens: caregiving expectations, reproductive labor, social control, vulnerability to violence, and unequal participation in political and economic life. These burdens can make depressive symptoms more damaging to overall quality of life.
Bottom line
This study shows that young people’s mental health is not only shaped by what happens inside their minds or homes. It is also shaped by how they experience society. When the nation feels resilient, just, cohesive, and trustworthy, young people may be less depressed and more satisfied with life. But these benefits are gendered. Men and women may not receive the same psychological returns from national resilience, and depression may not harm life satisfaction in the same way across gender.
For mental health nursing and public health, the lesson is clear: mental health care must be socially aware, politically engaged, and gender-sensitive.
Policy/practice recommendations
- Use mental health check-ins during national crises
Schools, workplaces, and community health settings can conduct brief mental health check-ins during periods of crisis, such as pandemics, disasters, political unrest, or election-related instability. - Treat national resilience as a public mental health issue
Public trust, social justice, solidarity, and effective institutions are not only political concerns. They can shape depression and life satisfaction among young people. - Activate nurses’ advocacy role
Nurses can help public and private institutions design policies that protect mental wellbeing, especially during social crises. The paper emphasizes that nurses should not be silent about threats to political stability and public mental health. - Make mental health programs gender-sensitive
Depression may affect women’s life satisfaction more strongly. Mental health programs should consider gendered burdens such as caregiving, reproductive labor, violence, exclusion, and unequal access to power. - Move toward gender-transformative practice
Mental health nursing should not only adapt services for women and men. It should also challenge the social structures that create gendered mental health risks. - Include women and gender-diverse people in resilience planning
Policies that aim to build national resilience should include the voices of women and gender-nonconforming people, especially in crisis planning, disaster response, public health, and mental health policymaking. - Teach political determinants of mental health
Nursing and allied health education should help students understand how governance, public trust, social cohesion, disinformation, corruption, gender inequality, and rights protection shape mental health.
Glossary of key terms
- National resilience — A society’s perceived capacity to withstand crises, maintain cohesion, protect citizens, and recover from threats.
- Life satisfaction — A person’s overall judgment of how satisfied and fulfilled they are with their life.
- Depression — A mental health condition or symptom pattern involving persistent negative mood, fatigue, hopelessness, worthlessness, or loss of interest.
- Emerging adulthood — The life stage from roughly 18 to 29 years old, marked by identity exploration, instability, future planning, and increasing autonomy.
- Resiliency theory — A theory explaining how protective or promotive factors help people achieve positive outcomes despite risks.
- Compensatory model of resilience — A model suggesting that protective factors can neutralize or reduce the effects of risk exposure.
- Gendered lens to resilience — An approach that examines how gender roles, inequalities, and social structures shape resilience and wellbeing.
- Social determinants of mental health — Social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional conditions that shape mental health outcomes.
- Human security — A people-centered view of security focused on freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom to live with dignity.
- Human rights-based approach to mental health — An approach that treats mental health as connected to rights, dignity, accountability, and the responsibilities of institutions.
- Mediation — A statistical relationship where one variable explains part of the link between a predictor and an outcome. Here, depression partly explains how national resilience affects life satisfaction.
- Moderation — A statistical relationship where one variable changes the strength or direction of another relationship. Here, gender changes some of the relationships among national resilience, depression, and life satisfaction.
- Moderated mediation — A model that tests both mediation and moderation at the same time.
- NR-13 — The short version of the National Resilience Scale, used to measure national resilience.
- K10 — Kessler Psychological Distress Scale; this study used its depression-related items.
- SWLS — Satisfaction with Life Scale, used to measure life satisfaction.
- Gender-sensitive practice — Practice that recognizes that mental health needs and outcomes may differ by gender because of social inequalities.
- Gender-transformative praxis — A way of thinking and acting that not only recognizes gender inequality but works to change the structures that produce it.
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