Anxiety Disorders in Working and Non-working Menopausal Women

During menopause, many women experience increased anxiety. Anxiety can often occur in combination with depression. While the exact connection between anxiety and menopause remains unclear, a complicated combination of factors common during this transitional time in a woman’s life may contribute in this study to assess and compare the anxiety level among working and non-working women under perimenopausal and postmenopausal stages. For selecting sample Purposive Random Sampling Techniques was used. 120 menopausal women were selected from Jodhpur city. The sample was consisting of 30 working and 30 non-working perimenopausal women and 30 working and 30 non-working postmenopausal women, age between 45 years to 55 years. Sinha’s Anxiety Scale (Sinha, D. 1962) was used to measure the anxiety level of subjects. All the data was statistically evaluated by using of SPSS 11.5. Discriminate functional analysis was also applied to study the relationship between the anxiety test of the respondents. There was significant difference observed in the mean values of anxiety among working and non-working postmenopausal women reflecting the dual work enhancing anxiety among working women. There was no significant difference to be observed in the mean values of anxiety among working and non-working perimenopausal women, perimenopausal and postmenopausal working women, perimenopausal and postmenopausal non-working women irrespective of their menopausal stages and working and non-working conditions. The high anxiety found among working women may be due to their dual work, time constraint and target achievement at work place. Low to normal anxiety found in non-working women may be due to no time pressure and no dual work. They can plan their day’s activity at their own convenience and can even postpone some of the task which is non-essential.