Health: Is it your relationship that needs help - or you?

Britain on the Couch

OBVIOUSLY DIVORCE often causes depression but what about the other way around: could depression equally cause divorce? Certainly, there is a simple correlation between the two. Rates of depression have risen tenfold since 1950 and divorce has quadrupled, but sorting out cause from effect is not easy.

Ever since the 1960s it has been widely supposed that divorcing couples were incompatible and that each would be happier if they found someone more suitable. The possibility that one or both partners were simply depressed and thus impossible to live with has rarely been considered. Yet there is abundant evidence that a pre-existing, premarital disposition to depression destroys innumerable marriages.

Depressed partners are prone to be hostile, paranoid and aggressive with intimates, while often placid, compliant and pleasing to friends and colleagues. So it comes as no surprise that depressives are also more likely to divorce. As the leading American depression researcher Myrna Weissman put it: "Marital relationships become an arena for the depression."

Researchers find that couples with a depressive member are more disharmonious. A study that followed 56 married depressives over a two-year period found they were nine times more likely to divorce than the general population. But which comes first, the marital disharmony or the depression? There are two theories.

The first, dominant one pinpoints "marital incompatibility" as the cause. Troubled marriages are seen as the product of ineffectual communication patterns resulting from personal incompatibility.

The American psychologist John Gottman asked over 100 newlywed couples to pick a perennial bone of contention and videotaped their ensuing discussion. He found that the way they dealt with the problem predicted whether they were still together four years later. In this view, successful marriage is a case of finding the right person and making sure that destructive patterns of problem solving do not develop.

That this perspective became so popular during the period after 1965 when millions of dissatisfied husbands and wives were asking themselves if they were with the right partner may be no coincidence. Of course, unhappy marriages can cause previously stable and well-adjusted individuals to develop depression but this view has become so dominant that the alternative has been almost totally forgotten: that emotional problems predating the marriage in one or both of the partners could cause the marital problems.

In this view, there are people whose personalities would have put them at high risk of divorce whoever they had married. In order to test the theory, a study would ideally have followed a large sample from childhood to late adulthood. Only then would it be clear how much any emotional problems preceded the marriage. No studies have gone as far back as that but seven have tested the personalities of couples shortly before they married and followed up what happened to them subsequently.

In all of these, premaritally depressed women were more likely to subsequently divorce than undepressed ones. One British study found that mild depression in girls at age 16 predicted subsequent increased risk of divorce. But the findings did not only apply to women.

Premaritally disordered men were also more at risk although their problems did not show up in the form of depression but as aggression. Lack of impulse control - short temper, ill-considered deeds and words - in husbands predicted subsequent disharmony and divorce compared with men without these traits before marriage.

The differences between men and women may reflect differences in the way the genders express aggression. Women are more likely to blame themselves when frustrated and angry whereas men blame others and launch attacks. Hence, depression is twice as common in women worldwide whereas men tend to deny they are depressed, and instead become aggressive. They are seven times more likely to commit violent crimes.

But, interestingly, three-quarters of convicted violent men become depressed when prevented from lashing out by imprisonment, a far higher proportion than men imprisoned for nonviolent crimes. Since most violent men are impulsive and since violence is the male method of expressing depression, the high divorce rate of impulsive men may ultimately be a sign that they are also depressive.

An eighth study, the most rigorous of the lot, supports the theory. It followed 300 married couples from before they had married in 1940, to 1980. Those who divorced were significantly more likely to have had emotional problems before they married than those who stayed married. Divorcees of both sexes were more likely to have been premaritally depressed - men as well as women - and the divorced men were more likely to have lacked impulse control.

The authors concluded: "The husband's impulsiveness and the depressiveness of both spouses are potent predictors of negative marital outcomes... in marital relationships, depression acts to bring about distress, and the other traits of the husband help to determine whether the distress is brought to a head (in divorce) or suffered passively (in a stable but unsatisfactory marriage)."

Of course there is such a thing as incompatibility. But more often than not, both partners will benefit from looking hard at their own pathology before blaming the relationship and splitting up only to repeat the same pattern later. Much more often than is currently supposed, it is the individual and not The Relationship that needs treatment.

Oliver James's book `Britain On The Couch - Why We're Unhappier Compared With 1950 Despite Being Richer, is now available in paperback (Arrow, pounds 7.99)