Sex, Marital Status, and Psychiatric Treatment: A Research Note

Abstract

In 1972 I reviewed the published studies conducted in Western industrial nations since World War II which used some indicator of mental illness and provided a breakdown by sex and marital status. All of the studies (n = 17) showed married women to have higher rates of mental illness than married men, and most of them showed never-married men (11 studies out of 15), divorced men (8 studies out of 11) and widowed men (7 studies out of 9) to have higher rates of mental illness than their female counterparts. This paper has been widely cited and has played a critical part in the literature on sex rules, marital roles, and mental illness. All of the studies in Gove (a) deal with limited populations or samples, and I have recently become aware of NIMH reports which present much more comprehensive data. Because these data deal with a critical issue, are very comprehensive, and because they are not entirely consistent with the studies reviewed in Gove (a), it is important that they be introduced into the literature. Redick and Johnson present data on all admissions to state and county (henceforth referred to as public) mental hospitals for 1970, Meyer presents data for all admissions to outpatient psychiatric services for 1970-71 and Bachrach presents data for all discharges from psychiatric units in general hospitals for 1970-71. The data are derived from very large representative surveys from all treatment centers involved and in the reports the rates have been generalized to cover the nation as a whole for a year. For all treatment settings the rates included both first admissions and readmissions. As the data involve the same time period, I have provided-in addition to the separate rates-the overall rates of episodes of treatment. The rates of treatment in three settings, and for all settings combined, are presented in Table 1. The sex ratio by marital status and treatment setting are presented in Table 2 and the ratios comparing the married and the various unmarried statuses are presented in Table 3. As is shown, perhaps most clearly in Table 2, overall married women have higher rates of treatment than married men. This overall statistic is consistent with previous studies. However, in the specific case of public mental hospitals,