The impossible task of caring for ageing parents who did not care for you: ‘There’s a lot of reliving old triggers’

According to research, those with a history of parental abuse or neglect showed significantly more frequent depressive symptoms when providing care to their parent. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images

The phone call came in mid-2016. “I’ve got cancer,” the old woman announced. Kathy*, a small business consultant, lived in Sydney. Her widowed mother, then in her 80s, lived in a large regional town four hours’ drive away.

For the next five years, Kathy became her mother’s drive-in, drive-out carer, clocking up thousands of kilometres on her odometer.