Psychiatric Illness in the Physician's Wife

The records of 50 wives of physicians admitted to a private psychiatric hospital have been reviewed. Despite a high level of adaptation in the early years of marriage, they later developed severe psychiatric illnesses requiring repeated hospitalizations. A precipitating factor in many of these cases appeared to be a feeling of increasing exclusion from the husband's life, as he became more and more involved in his profession. Symptoms of depression, somatization and addiction were prevalent and were related dynamically and empirically to the profession of the husband.