Unmarried People Have a Higher Risk of Depression

A new study looked at marital status and depression in seven countries.

Reviewed by Tyler Woods

Key points

• A new study on analyzed being unmarried and the occurrence of depression in 541 million people.
• Unmarried people have a higher risk of depression across seven countries, according to the study.
• Unmarried people from Western countries, men, and people with more education are at higher risk of depression.

Depression is a global health problem that is affected by many factors. Importantly, social relations are known to affect depression. A high level of loneliness has been linked to increased depression. On the contrary, being in a stable and loving long-term relationship may be a protective factor against depression for some people. It could therefore be assumed that a loving marriage may represent a factor that protects against depression.

A new study on being married and depression

While the association between depression and marriage has been investigated in previous studies with varying results, these studies often had two problems. On the one hand, they focused overly on Western cultures, like the U.S. and neglected other cultures. On the other hand, their sample sizes were sometimes fairly small. A new study on marriage and depression, just published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature Human Behaviour aimed at solving these issues (Zhai and colleagues, 2024).

The scientists analyzed data on being married and depression from seven different countries (the U.S., the U.K., Mexico, Ireland, Korea, China, and Indonesia). Overall, an impressive number of approximately 541 million people were included in the study, making the findings very trustworthy. In addition to marriage status and depression symptoms, several other pieces of information about the volunteers were analyzed, such as gender and level of education.

Unmarried people are at greater risk for depression

What did the scientists find out?

The results of the study were crystal clear: Across all seven countries, unmarried people had a significantly higher risk of depressive symptoms than married people.

Interestingly, the association of being married and depression was influenced by several different factors. These included the country (people in Western countries had a greater risk of depressive symptoms when unmarried than people in Eastern countries), gender (men had a greater risk of depressive symptoms when unmarried than women), and level of education (people with a higher level of education had a greater risk of depressive symptoms than people with a lower level of education). Moreover, alcohol drinking and smoking were identified as potential mechanisms by which unmarried individuals show more depressive symptoms.