Mental Health Among the Divorced

DIVORCE in the United States is a social and personal problem of major dimensions. A considerable body of evidence links divorce with psychiatric disturbance. For example, families with multiple problems in which a high percentage of the marital Partners show signs of emotional disturbance or immaturity are highly vulnerable to divorce.¹Personality problems have been cited as causal in divorce,²and a number of Workers³,⁴report increased mental hospital admission rates among divorced persons. However, the only study of the relative frequency of mental illness in divorced and nondivorced persons in a nonpatient population with which we are acquainted is a study of persons over 65 in an upstate New York urban community.⁵ Our own inquiry into the relationship between divorce and mental illness was prompted by the nature of responses given by respondents investigated in a field study