The first aim of our study was to examine the association between mental distress and divorce over time, testing for long-term selection effects. In general, the results from the present study show that there is a significant association between mental distress and divorce. The current results expand on previous research by testing this association on longitudinal couple data from a large, representative sample. Couples with a mentally distressed husband or wife had more than a twofold risk of divorce compared to couples in which neither spouse suffered from mental distress, even after controlling for demographic variables and other covariates. The results show a peak in the effect of mental distress on hazard of divorce in the years immediately preceding the event and, further, that mental distress predicts divorce for as long as 8 years or more into the future. A social causation explanation for the peak in the effect of mental distress during the years around the divorce is plausible. However, the results showing a risk for divorce many years after the observation of mental distress provide evidence of a strong selection effect. This contradicts Mastekaasa’s [15] finding, but supports other longitudinal research [11,32,33].
Because marital problems have been found to predict divorce [34], one might argue that our results may reflect chronic problems within the marriage leading to mental distress and subsequent divorce, rather than mental distress being a direct cause. In fact, a recent review of couple- and family-based treatments in depression stated that there seems to be a reciprocal relationship between marital quality and depressive symptoms [35]. On the other hand, one study based on couple data found that although both partners’ degree of psychopathology was related to both partners’ degree of marital satisfaction, the more important factor for marital satisfaction was one’s own degree of psychopathology [36]. In other words, the poorer one’s mental health, the more dissatisfied one may be with one’s marriage. Thus, marital problems may also be a result of mental distress. Unfortunately, our data did not include information on marital satisfaction.
Like mental distress, alcohol use has been shown in the same data material to predict divorce [37], and alcohol use could well be suspected to mediate as well as confound the effect of mental distress. However, entering the demographic factors, social support, and life style, including alcohol use, as covariates did not change the estimates very much. These results imply that neither alcohol use nor the other covariates strongly confound or mediate the effects of mental distress on divorce.
The second aim of our study was to investigate whether the observed selection effects reflect an individual-level or couple-level phenomenon. To the extent that couples in our study concordant on mental distress have an especially high risk of divorce, our results support the findings of both Merikangas [24] and Butterworth and Rodgers [7]. However, our results show a significant interaction effect between husbands’ mental distress and wives’ mental distress in the first and second analyses, indicating that the elevated divorce risk among these couples is also related to mental distress at the couple-level. This contradicts the results from Butterworth and Rodgers’ study [7] which seemed to reflect only an additive effect of individual mental health problems, and no interaction effect between mental health in each of the spouses. The interaction effect in our study was no longer significant when excluding couples who divorced within 8 years after baseline, but this is likely to result from loss of statistical power. The number of couples in which both partners were mentally distressed and who also experienced divorce was reduced from 72 couples in the first analysis, to 20 couples in the second analysis, and to 10 couples in the final analysis, still the estimates in the final model were very similar to those in the previous model. Likewise, lack of power may explain why Butterworth and Rodgers [7] did not find evidence for an interaction effect.
Our finding of the interaction effect indicates that there may be a certain protective effect of being married to a person with a level of mental distress similar to ones own level, even in couples with two mentally distressed partners. This is supportive of the health mismatch hypothesis [38] which posits that couples with concordant health status are at a lower risk of getting divorced than couples with discordant health status. Similar findings have been reported in other research. In a recent study on alcohol use, concordant heavy drinking predicted divorce to a lesser extent than what was expected from the combined main effects, possibly due to perceived compatibility or a judgement that it may be difficult to deal with the problems alone and to find a new partner [37]. It is not difficult to imagine that this scenario might hold also for people with mental distress. Another explanation may be related to assortative mating, referring to the tendency for individuals to choose life partners with similar characteristics as themselves, which has been reported for psychiatric disorders [39]. It may be that people with similar mental health understand each other better, and are thus better able to cope with challenges related to couple mental distress. In conclusion, couples with one or two mentally distressed partners in our study have a persistently higher risk of divorce than couples in which neither partner suffers from mental distress. The divorce rate for couples with two mentally distressed partners was lower than expected, but still high. Thus, our results suggest that mentally distressed individuals are indeed selected out of marriage.
Although gender differences are not a focus of our study, we note that the effect of mental distress on divorce was stronger for women than for men, contrary to the finding in Butterworth and Rodgers’ study [7]. However, the sizes of the differences are well within what could be due to random fluctuations.
Limitations
Unfortunately, our data did not include information on marital satisfaction. This is important, as the effect of women’s mental health problems on marital disruption disappeared when controlling for women’s relationship dissatisfaction in the study by Butterworth and Rodgers [7]. Likewise, Breslau and colleagues [5] noted that the observed relation between mental disorder and divorce across 12 countries in their study may have partly been a result of preceding marital distress.
Despite our large sample, lack of power is probably the reason why an interaction effect was not detected in our final analysis, since the estimates of the interaction effect is highly similar for all three sets of analyses.
The design of our study did not permit us to investigate both long-term social causation and social selection effects.
We do not know how well our results generalize to other societies. For instance the risk associated with mental illness in both spouses could be higher in a society in which mental health services are less available than in ours, and in which mentally ill spouses to a larger extent are left to take care of each other.
Another limitation pertains to the lack of information on whether some of the couples in our study were remarried, since people who have previously divorced are more likely to get divorced again. Furthermore, our sample included married couples only and not cohabiting couples. It is, however, unlikely that the inclusion of cohabiting couples would have represented a substantial change of the results. A study by Ask and colleagues [23] based on couple data from HUNT 1 estimated that about 1.2% of all the participating couples were cohabiting whereas the rest were married.
We chose to dichotomize our principal explanatory variables, mental distress in husband and wife. While this may be considered a limitation, because it implies losing some information, it makes the results more easily interpretable. Also, very skewed distributions of the MD variables make treating them as continuous predictor variables a little problematic.
Finally, despite our efforts to control for a wide range of covariates, we do not have information about circumstances that may occur in the period from baseline to year of divorce, such as the birth of (more) children, the death of relatives, changes in social support, changes in socioeconomic status, fluctuations in mental health and so on. Thus, our results should be interpreted with caution. For example, a major negative life event such as losing one’s job may negatively affect a family’s socioeconomic status and also the climate in a couple’s relationship and contribute to an eventual divorce.
However, our study has several strengths. It is based on couple data from a large, population based sample followed for many years. We were able to control for a range of relevant variables, including years of marriage, which is important because of higher dissolution rates in the earlier years of marriage [40].
Future studies should be based on data from both spouses and, ideally, follow people for some years before they marry and then for many years after, in order to be able to examine social causation as well as social selection in the same sample. It is not surprising that divorce may lead to mental distress, but the question of whether mentally distressed people are selected out of marriage may be less straightforward. In our study, mental distress apparently seems to lead to divorce, but this association may also be due to unknown third factors such as marital dissatisfaction, economic hardship or shared negative life events. Such factors should be studied in more detail. The dynamics of the shared climate of two mentally distressed spouses is also a subject that deserves more attention. Why is it that such couples in our study did not divorce as frequently as would have been expected from the double risk? Is it because both spouses lack the resources to implement the process of divorce, or have some of these couples developed certain strategies that help them understand each other and lead a relatively well functioning life together despite it all? Or maybe shared exposure to a major negative life event caused mental distress in both spouses but tied them closer together rather than result in marital conflicts. Answers to these questions may aid mental health professionals in identifying couples at risk for divorce, and in helping such couples to understand and deal with challenges related to mental distress both as individuals and couples.