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Background: The learned hopelessness produces negative encouragement for individuals that can take them to lose their motivation, hope to reach goals and give up to the future. The ideas of hopelessness in the elderly produce negative thoughts like his life is meaningless, passive desire to die, and suicidal thinking; same as hopelessness, depression is a common mental disorder in the elderly that when it becomes chronic or recurrent hinders seriously the coping performance of the daily life and as a risk factor that could cause disease and functional decline in its most severe stage produce a functional death.
Purpose: To determine the relationship between learned hopelessness and depression as a risk factor and predictor of functional death in the elderly.
Material and Methods: This study will focus on non-experimental quantitative research with cross design with explanatory scope as Hernández, Fernández and Batista classified it. The study population will consist of older adults belonging from the Centro Estatal del Adulto Mayor of Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico. Sampling will be for convenience, depending on the older adults attending the consult at the center in one week. The Yesavage Geriatric Depression Scale will be the measure instrument which consists of 30 items, the Beck Hopelessness Scale, which contains 20 items, and the Barthel Index 10 items to measure functionality. The variables that will be measured are hopelessness, depression and functional death.
Outcomes: The results will be measured for data collection with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences version 2.1 together with graphics for sociodemographic variables, and Pearson correlation coefficient to establish the relationship between the study variables.
Conclusion: Find how the learned hopelessness is a risk factor for depression and at time, a functional predictor of death in the elderly. Will discuss the importance of avoiding the functional death in older adults.
Key words: Learned hopelessness, Depression, Functional decline, Functional death, Elderly