Culture Post: Wedded bliss: Married People Are Less Likely to Be Depressed, 7-Country Analysis Suggests

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Unmarried people may be about 80% more likely to have depressive symptoms than those who are married, suggests an analysis of more than 100,000 individuals across 7 countries, published in Nature Human Behaviour.

The risk of depression for unmarried individuals was also found to be higher in male individuals and those who had higher educational attainment. The findings may help identify demographic groups at higher risk of depression.

Kefeng Li and colleagues analyzed individual-level data from 106,556 participants in 7 countries—US, UK, Mexico, Ireland, South Korea, China, and Indonesia—to investigate the risk of depressive symptoms among married and unmarried individuals across a follow-up period of 4 to 18 years for a subset of 20,865 individuals. They found that unmarried status is associated with a 79% higher risk of depressive symptoms compared to those who are married.

Li and colleagues suggest that the lower rates of depression among married couples could be due to the exchange of social support within a couple, better access to economic resources and positive influence on each other’s well-being. However, the authors note that a limitation of the study is that data were collected via self-report questionnaires and not from clinical diagnoses of depression, and that all of the couples analyzed in this study were heterosexual.

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-bliss-people-depressed-country-analysis.html

Find more culture news on HomeWord’s Culture Blog, named in 2024 for the ninth consecutive year as one of the top 50 culture blogs on the planet (#19 of  50)!