The first article is “Mid-life Crisis: Helping Patients Cope With Stress, Anxiety, and Depression”. The article presents a fictional case report of a person the psychologists call John who cannot seem to escape from the “sandwich” of problems associated with his adult children and the needs of his aging parents. It also recommends methods of treatment for health physicians to treat the

In this article, the indication is that few middle-aged adults experience any height in crisis over any other time period in their life span (Shek 1996). The other indication is that women seemed to be more concerned with their position in life. Does this mean that there is no such thing as midlife crisis? I doubt it. Rather, I believe that this just shows that the midlife crisis may be more of a cultural phenomenon rather than being common entrenched in human nature. From the other articles I have examined and many other studies mentioned in this particular article, there clearly exists the phenomenon of midlife crisis. I think that is very likely that in America, the stress of competition and failure could influence how people look at their lives, and therefore could bring out a crisis. As far as women being more stressed about life than men, this probably deserves more investigation. It would make sense that both genders would come to a point of reflection in their life.

In conclusion, one can draw a couple of things from looking at these articles as a whole. First, everyone has concerns about their own mortality. From China to America and whether female or male there is a fascination within us all that causes us to look forward to the future and wonder what will be after us (Waskel 1992). Secondly, for a happy family life and personal happiness within oneself, a good relationship with children must be had (Julian and McKenry 1991). Just as adolescents need the guidance and supervision of their parents they also need their own independence to mature enough to be happy in their own family life. Lastly, and possibly most importantly, midlife crisis is a serious matter. If people are allowed to take it to far there can be disastrous results such as drug addiction and suicide from major depression (Samuels 1997). The concept of midlife crisis is definitely something to be studied further so that we may understand more fully the way in which we keep developing over our journey from birth to death.

The problems with this research are fairly similar to the other studies. First off, this is a comparison study, which deduces that because certain people answered specific questions on one survey that that relates to the responses on a separate survey. The survey also used the convenience sample, which limits generalizability (Waskel 1992). But the survey did open avenues to be further explored. If I were to do further research in this area I would definitely use equal numbers of women and men or only men. Since mid-life crisis is considered to be primarily a male issue, this would probably yield a more accurate relationship between death concern and mid-life crisis. Another possibility would be to conduct a survey of people who claim to have experienced a mid-life crisis and ask them specific questions of their concern over death.

There were a couple of significant problems with this study. First, it was not a random sample. The researchers used people from a very similar background for the majority of the subjects (Julian and McKenry 1991). I would think that future studies would need to encompass a wider range of people, specifically people of lower economic status. I believe that this variable could have a significant influence on the relationship a middle-aged man has with his children while he is going through his own life change. Another problem is, again, the use of surveys and not direct research. Although this is a convenient means of gathering data, several case studies involving families of differing socio-economic levels would undoubtedly be more complete and informative. Much work remains to be done before we can even begin to have an understanding of this complex subject.

The problems with this study were less than the other studies previously discussed. The researchers did use a large sample group, which would indicate more accurate results. The problems lie in two aspects: t

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