The Patient's Spouse

¹ M.R.C. Clinical Psychiatry Research Unit, Graylingwell Hospital, Chichester

1. A group of 75 patients (31 men and 44 women) and 95 controls (32 men and 63 women), known to be closely matched on age, sex, social class, father's social class, educational status and number of children, formed the basis of a postal survey in which the subjects and their spouses were asked to complete the Maudsley Personality Inventory and the Cornell Medical Index and to give certain biographical details. The overall response rate was 85 per cent. There was no evidence that the responders were atypical of their groups in any important respect. The male and female patients who replied were closely comparable with control subjects of the same sex over a range of variables.

2. The patients' spouses were more neurotic and had more physical and psychological symptoms than same-sex control subjects. This discrepancy became more marked (and more highly significant statistically) when the subjects were re-classified on a psychometric basis.

3. Correlations between spouses were usually positive at significant levels in both groups, with the exception of extraversion.

4. Length of marriage was reflected in a progressive increase in neuroticism among the patients' spouses when compared with controls, and the same was true of M-R and total G.M.I. scores. Extraversion and A-L scores showed no such trend.

5. Patients and their spouses had zero or non-significant correlations during the early years of marriage on introversion, neuroticism, physical and mental health. On all these, control subjects and their spouses showed highly significant positive correlations at the comparable period of marriage. As marriage progressed, patients and their spouses correlated increasingly highly on neuroticism and psychological health, while in normal pairs the concordance progressively fell.

6. It appeared that wives were more likely than husbands to reflect the illness of their spouses.

7. After evaluation of the data, some implications were discussed, and it was concluded that neither assortative mating nor interaction between marriage partners could alone explain all the findings. The role of each factor was reviewed, and stress laid on the relative social isolation in which patient-spouse interaction often occurs.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				K. R. Merikangas Assortative Mating for Psychiatric Disorders and Psychological Traits Arch Gen Psychiatry, October 1, 1982; 39(10): 1173 - 1180. [Abstract] [PDF]