Marriage and Mental Illness

Two female psychiatric patient samples were examined--240 women, aged 20 or over, from North East Scotland; and 44, aged 40 to 49, from Chichester, West Sussex. There was also a Chichester community sample of 230 women of similar age-range. The N.E. Scotland psychiatric patients with poor marriages broke down significantly earlier, and the delay between marriage and first breakdown was significantly shorter. This group also tended to have a neurotic rather than an endogenous type of depression. The poor marriages of the Chichester psychiatric patients were, in the main, similar to those of the Chichester non-patients, but the patients demonstrated significantly more disturbance of sexual relationships, and their in-laws were significantly more disapproving.