Marriage a cure for depression?

Jun 5 2007

Many people out there - especially some men will find the latest research on depression laughable......lift your depression by getting married!

Whoever said "to find a committed man look in a mental asylum" may have had a point as researchers say marriage has been proven to lift the mood of people suffering from depression.

A new study suggests that marriage provides more of a psychological boost to depressed people than to happy people, even if the marriage turns out to be pretty average.

In other research the psychological perks of marriage appear dependent on the quality of the union and a happy marriage is the result of a happy couple.

Some studies have even indicated that depressed people, who are often poor communicators place more demands on a marriage with their greater need for caring and support and end up in unhappier marriages.

Researcher Adrianne Frech, a sociology graduate student at Ohio State University, along with her colleague, Kristi Williams was eager to test the hypothesis that people who are depressed have worse marital quality and experience fewer benefits from marriage.

For their study the researchers looked at a sample of 3,066 men and women who had been interviewed and tested for depression once in either 1987 or 1988 and then again five years later.

The team used data for their study from the National Survey of Families and Households.

What was revealed was quite unexpected.

Those who had been depressed at the start of the study and then married scored an average of 7.56 points lower on the depression scale than the depressed who did not marry, while those who were happy and got married scored only 1.87 points lower on the scale.

Results from the study also showed that married people who are depressed, tended to report less marital happiness and more marital conflict but overall, their moods were more upbeat.

Frech says it was found that marriage provided a much bigger psychological boost to the depressed subjects than to the happy subjects.

The depressed benefit more from a transition into marriage despite their having, on average, worse marital quality, says Frech.

The researchers suggest that marriage provides the companionship and emotional support needed to help alleviate depression.

The findings are published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.