Study: Divorced Women Suffer More Stress, Illness

Reported August 31, 2007

Women may give up more than a husband by divorcing. They may also lose some of their good health.

There's a popular belief among spouses in bad marriages that divorce might relieve their stress and lead to a happier life, but divorce actually increased chronic stress and produced greater physical illness, according to a new study.

The study by Iowa State University spanned 10 years of focusing on what happens to rural women's health after their marriage ends, compared with women who stay married.

Fred Lorenz co-authored the report, and said they found getting a divorce produced no immediate effects on physical health, but it did have effects on mental health. And he added that 10 years later, those effects on mental health led to effects in physical health.

The findings came from data gathered from 416 rural Iowa women who were interviewed three times in the early 1990s, and again in 2001. All the women interviewed were the mothers of adolescent children when the study began.

During the years immediately after divorce, the women reported 7 percent higher levels of psychological distress than married women. They did not report any differences in physical illness at that time.

The increased distress among the recently divorced women was found after controlling for other sources of stress, including income, which was only about half ($20,300) the amount reported by married women ($41,400). An important factor linking divorce to later psychological distress was the experience of stressful life events, according to Lorenz

A decade later, the divorced women reported 37 percent more physical illness when compared to their married counterparts -- even after the researchers controlled for age, remarriage, education, income and prior health.

Lorenz believes that other conditions associated with divorce -- perhaps social isolation and relatively poor job opportunities -- are important in explaining why divorced women report more illnesses a decade after their divorce.

But even though the physical illnesses were reported, they reported no difference in psychological stress that could be directly linked to the divorce.

K.A.S. Wickrama, another co-author of the study, said it looks like divorced women "are trapped in this vicious circle of financial problems and other stressful life events -- such as having their safety net destroyed in the form of housing, insurance, transportation, social support, sharing in the kids, etc."

He said there were more than 100 events documented that may have caused this, including such things as demotions, layoffs, accidents, critical illness, and parental problems.

The researchers documented 46 illnesses for the women in this study to choose from -- ranging from the common cold and sore throats, to heart conditions, diabetes and cancer. The severity of these illnesses appears to be linked to the quality of the marriage before the divorce.

"Among married couples, we predicted couples with good quality marriages did not experience early onset of hypertension, while those with bad marriages were more likely to have experienced onset of early hypertension," Wickrama said. "In 1997, we wrote one article that related marriage qualities and physical illness. We showed change in marriage quality links to change in physical illness for both men and women."

"We found that divorced individuals who remarried indirectly decreased the risk of health problems because they saw beneficial influences on their financial difficulties," Wickrama said. "Consistently divorced people continued to experience higher level of economic and health problems."

The researchers wrote in a related paper that women's self-reports of earlier "deviant behavior" -- which included adolescent delinquency -- rivaled divorce as a predictor of stressful events and depressive symptoms, suggesting that deviant behavior earlier in life may be influencing both the likelihood of future divorce and future physical and emotional health problems. They are planning future research that prospectively links childhood experiences to adult physical and mental health.

Forty of the divorced women in the sample either remarried or cohabitated with a partner. Remarriage was found to have a positive influence on family income, eventually improving health outcomes.

The researchers have been studying romantic relationships and marriage in middle-aged adults. The team just received a $2.5 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue the study of romantic relationships and marriage in young adults, and the link of relationship development to changes in physical and emotional health.

The results of this study were published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.