Marital Status and Mental Disorders Among the Aged

THERE has been increasing interest in recent years in problems of aging, particularly in the problems of psychological adjustment and mental disorder among the aged.' Two factors contributing to this interest are the growing proportion of aged persons in our population and the relatively high incidence of mental disorders, both hospitalized and non-hospitalized, among the aged. While much concern has been expressed about improved care and treatment of the aged mentally ill, increasingly attention has been directed toward the development of preventive programs. With the general objective of obtaining information which may be useful in increasing the effectiveness of such efforts, a community survey of mental disorders among the aged was undertaken. This paper is the first in a series of analyses directed toward the following two goals: (1) determining the extent to which readily obtained personal data provide a basis for the economical identification of aged subgroups with differential risks of mental disorders; (2) obtaining clues as to variables possessing etiological significance for these disorders. In this paper, the relationship of mental disorder to marital status categories, particularly the married and widowed, is analyzed. relevance of an examination of this specific relationship is suggested by earlier theoretical speculations and empirical findings. Several writers have discussed the significance of the marital role as a factor influencing personal adjustment. For example, Adler advanced the general hypothesis that 'the emotional security and social stability afforded by married life makes for low incidence of mental illness. 2 Conversely, loss of spouse may be viewed as tending to disrupt the established modes of satisfying a variety of needs, as well as establishing with traumatic impact the recognition of one's own mortality. Furthermore, bereavement introduces a new social role, widowhood. Not only is this role generally evaluated negatively, but the normative expectations attached to it are vague and contradictory. Empirical investigations indicate that the widowed as well as the single and divorced show mental disorder rates substantially higher than the married. Many of these *This is a revised version of a paper presented at the American Sociological Society meeting, August 1957. We wish to thank Dr. Linton Freeman and Miss Isabel McCaffrey for a critical reading of this earlier version. survey on which the data in this paper are based was undertaken by the New York State Mental Health Commission under the general direction of Dr. Ernest M. Gruenberg. We wish also to thank Dr. Joseph J. Downing, present director, for making this data available. 1 See, for example: John E. Anderson (editor), Psychological Aspects of Aging: Proceedings of a Conference on Planning Research, Bethesda, Md., Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, Inc., 1955; Ruth S. Cavan, E. W. Burgess, R. J. Havighurst, H. Goldhamer, Personal Adjustment in Old Age, Chicago: Science Research Associates, Inc., 1949; R. J. Havighurst and R. Albrecht, Older People, New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1953; Oscar Kaplan (editor), Mental Disorders in Later Life, Second Edition, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956; Bernard Kutner, David Fanshell, Alice M. Togo, and Thomas S. Langer, Five Hundred Over Sixty, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1956; Benjamin Malzberg, Social and Biological Aspects of Mental Disease, Utica, New York: State Hospital Press, 1940; Bernard S. Phillips, A Role Theory Approach to Predicting Adjustment of the Aged in Two Communities, Ann Arbor: University Microfilm (Dissertation), Cornell University, 1956; Otto Pollak, Social Adjustment in Old Age: A Research Planning Report (Bulletin 59) New York: Social Science Research Council, 1948; J. H. Sheldon, Social Medicine of Old Age: Report of an Inquiry in Wolverhampton, London: Oxford University Press, 1948. 2 Leta McKinney Adler, The Relationship of Marital Status to Incidence of and Recovery from Mental Illness, Social Forces, 32, 2 (December, 1953).