Study on depression: Those who are married are less likely to have it

"I'd just like some peace and quiet": anyone who has ever said this in a long-term relationship should think twice. Because: if a person lives in a marriage, they usually live a healthier life. This has already been demonstrated for heart disease. For example, the fear of a heart attack is lower in married people and the prognosis for recovery is better if one should occur, as was already researched over ten years ago. But marriage is also good for mental health: the risk of suffering from depressive symptoms is lower. This has now been shown by Chinese scientists from the Faculty of Medicine at Macao Polytechnic University in a large-scale survey covering 100,000 people in seven countries, which was published in the journal Nature on Monday.

Observation with follow-up over up to 18 years

Psychology currently assumes that five percent of the adult population worldwide suffer from severe depression. Older studies had already shown a tendency that living in a marriage can reduce the risk. However, these studies only included one or two countries, mostly in the western world, and did not take socio-economic factors or education into account. The team led by Kefeng Li and colleagues from Macau have now been able to analyze data broken down to individuals from a total of 106,556 participants, which showed a fairly good mix of countries: Great Britain and Ireland in Europe, the USA and Mexico in North America and China, South Korea and Indonesia in Asia. There was also a follow-up period of between 4 and 18 years for a subgroup of 20,000 people. Overall, according to the researchers, unmarried people have a 79 percent higher risk of suffering from depressive symptoms at least once in their lives compared to married people.

However, there is also a flip side to the coin: if the marriage goes wrong, things look very different. It was found that divorced or separated people have a 99 percent higher risk of depressive symptoms than those who are (hopefully happily) married. When looking at unmarried people, the risk of depression apparently depends on their origin. In the West, it was generally even higher than in Asia. Unmarried men are also more at risk of depression than unmarried women. Those who have enjoyed more education but are not married are also more likely to suffer from depressive symptoms.

Only traditional couple relationships studied

There are several theories as to why married people seem less likely to be depressed. Kefeng Li et al. believe that the couple relationship provides better social support for those involved, there are usually more economic resources available in the relationship and there could be a generally positive influence on each other, which increases well-being. Mind you, this only applies if the marriage works, i.e. is happy. "Our cross-national analysis suggests that unmarried people have a higher risk of depression. Any efforts to reduce this risk should consider the role of cultural context, gender, educational level and substance use."

The latter concerns, among other things, smoking, which had a negative impact on depression status in unmarried people in China and Mexico. The same applied to alcohol consumption in China, Korea and Mexico. It should be noted that the study only looked at traditional couple relationships between women and men; homosexual or transgender people were not included in the data. In addition, there were no clinical diagnoses of depression among the 100,000 people; instead, their status was recorded using a questionnaire. However, this is not unusual for psychological studies of this size. The data was nationally representative and can be extrapolated to a total population of almost 550 million adults.

(mki)