Depressed? Marriage May Just be the Cure

Are you single and depressed? A recent study shows that the best antidote for depression could be: marriage!

Two graduate students at Ohio State University looked at the pre-existing data, which indicates that the mental benefits of marriage depend upon the quality of the relationship, i.e. a happy marriage makes happily married people, and an unhappy marriage makes the participants miserable. They also looked at other studies that suggest that married depressed people, who often don't communicate well and need more care and emotional support than happy people, are more likely to be in an unhappy marriage. The two sociology students, Adrianne Frech and Kristi Williams, posited a theory that marriage is more beneficial to happy people than to depressed people.

To test their theory, they 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. In the interviews, they were asked about the quality of their marriage (if they were married).

Taking into account differences in depression, they found that subjects who had gotten married during the five years between the two interviews reported an improvement in psychological well-being in the second interview. The interviewees scored an average of 3.42 points lower on the 84-point depression scale than their counterparts who did not marry -- even if they reported that their marriages were only "so-so." However, when the students looked at how marriage affected those who had been depressed at the start of the study to those who had been happy, they found something unexpected. The depressed people who 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 to begin with and then married scored only 1.87 points lower on the scale.

“We were surprised,” Frech said. “We expected the depressed to have worse marital quality and therefore benefit less from a transition into marriage.”