Family Status and Mental Health

Abstract

Early epidemiological research on family status and mental health produced three "social facts": 1. Marriage is beneficial to mental health. 2. Marriage benefits the mental health of men more than women. 3. Parenthood causes psychological distress, especially for women. Until very recently, the first "fact" went largely uncontested. Durkheim (1897/1951) came to a similar conclusion at the turn of the century when he found that suicide rates were higher among the unmarried than the married. Working from a variety of theoretical perspectives, sociologists throughout the twentieth century concluded that marriage has beneficial effects on the individual. The second "fact" generated much more controversy beginning in the 1970s. Jesse Bernard (1972) argued, in support of a gender difference in marital benefits, that men and women experienced "his and hers marriages" in which women sacrifice more of themselves than do men, particularly in providing services to their spouses. Furthermore, she argued that men receive more benefits from marriage than do women. Walter Gove (Gove & Tudor, 1973) similarly argued that women are more depressed than men and that this sex difference is largely due to women's more frustrating and less rewarding roles, especially their marital roles. Bruce Dohrenwend (Dohrenwend, Dohrenwend, 1976) contested Gove's conclusions because Gove presented evidence only for neurotic disorders and functional psychoses—disorders for which women are overrepresented relative to men. He argued that Gove's definition of mental illness left out some of the most significant and serious disorders, particularly personality disorders, that happen to be more prevalent among men than women. Dohrenwend contended that the different types of disorders could be viewed as functional equivalents in the sense that men and women simply express psychological distress in different ways. In summary, women are generally not necessarily more distressed than men.