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Aging population across developed countries is a problem that no nation has faced before. It puts severe financial burden on every public budget. Non-financial burdens are also common. Depression turns out to be the most common mental disease. Studying the features, that could boost the exhibition of depressive symptoms, and those, that could protect individuals from them, would have significant effect on the precision of public health policies. That is the aim of the paper. We base our research on wave 7 data of the Survey of Health, Aging, and Retirement in Europe that for the first time summarizes information about 27 European countries and Israel. As a preliminary step in our analysis, we construct two latent variables used to quantify the level of depression. On the basis of extensive literature review, we identify a long list of potential features and apply lasso regression so as to select those of them that contribute most in explaining the variance of each of the latent variables. Delivered results indicate that among the most common features, leading to poor mental health, are working conditions, self-perceived health and the presence of functional limitations. On the other hand, educational attendance, lack of chronic diseases and sport activities are among the factors that protect from exhibiting depression symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]