Health and marriage breakdown: experience of a sample of divorced women.

The termination of a marriage by death or separation precipitates individuals into new roles and social situations, and it has long been assumed that this experience may create exceptional vulnerability to medico-social disorders. Stein and Susser (1969) have suggested that this vulnerability is created by the transitional event rather than by the continuing new situation. As a means of approaching the general question, this paper examines the self-reported health experience of a sample of female divorcees. The findings support the notion that transitions in marital status are causally related to morbidity, and suggest also that the general practitioner may be strategically situated to mediate in situations of marriage breakdown. Some students have been interested in the comparison of divorce and bereavement (Waller, 1951; Goode, 1964) because these situations share certain structural characteristics and because both may be emotionally disorganizing experiences. Theorizing, however, has not gone beyond the description of similarities and differences and the suggestion that the divorcee lacks the social support and welldefined role which western culture affords the widow. Even with current liberal social attitudes divorce is likely to be attended by a degree of moral obloquy and feelings of guilt or inadequacy, so that divorcees might perhaps be expected to undergo more personal disorganization than widows. Such comparisons, however, are currently prevented by the absence of appropriate studies. There are very few studies of the effects of divorce on health, and while studies of widowhood are more numerous some have unsatisfactory features and most concentrate on death or serious mental illness to the exclusion of lesser morbidity. Stein and Susser (1969) have reviewed many of the recent studies of the pathology of widowhood in the course of their own analysis of the relationship between bereavement and the inception of mental illness. More general morbidity among widows has been examined in an unquantified fashion by Marris (1958), who concluded that physical health was demonstrably worse after bereavement in half his cases, with some emphasis on psychosomatic disorders. Goode (1956) provides one of the few accounts of personal disorganization among divorcees, and his finding that the time of greatest disturbance coincided with separation supports the notion that transition into a less eligible marital state is related to morbidity. Marsden (1969) comments that marriage breakdown produces ill health, but his finding is unquantified, and divorcees are not distinguished from other categories of unsupported mothers.