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