Twenty Years of the Sociology of Mental Health: The Continued Significance of Gender and Marital Status for Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

Since the formation of the Mental Health Section of the American Sociological Association in 1992, scholars have made significant progress in our understanding of the social determinants of gender and marital status differences in emotional well-being. In this chapter, I summarize some broad themes that have emerged from the past two decades of scholarship on gender, marital status, and mental health, broadly defined—highlighting theoretical continuities and new developments, methodological innovations as well as important substantive findings. While earlier research focused on documenting gender and marital status differences in symptoms of depression and generalized psychological distress, this new wave of research pays close attention to the larger social, economic, and cultural context in which men’s and women’s lives are embedded, the proximate social conditions under which their social roles and relationships are emotionally beneficial or distressing as well as the different ways in which they express emotional disturbance. Overall, the large body of scholarship on these separate but highly interrelated topics indicates that despite profound social change in gender and marital patterns that have been occurring in the U.S. since the last quarter of the 20th century, gender and marital status continue to shape the mental health of adults in the early part of 21st century.