The Spouse of the Phobic Patient

¹ Senior Registrar, Littlemore Hospital, Oxford

1. Fifty consecutive married patients with symptoms of phobic anxiety mostly agoraphobic in type and treated at the Midland Nerve Hospital were asked to complete the Cornell Medical Index and Caine's Hysteroid-Obsessoid Questionnaire. Their spouses were asked to do likewise. There was a response rate of 96 per cent (31 women and 17 men).

2. While the patients' mean scores were high on the C.M.I., the spouses obtained low scores, below levels previously accepted as being indicative of neurosis.

3. No evidence was found of increasing tendency towards neuroticism in the spouse with increasing length of marriage. There was, however, a significant correlation of neuroticism scores between the couples married less than ten years.

4. Neither patients nor spouses showed predominantly obsessoid characters, and by using the adaptation of the H.O.Q. they were shown to rate each other as reliably as a non-neurotic control population.

5. No correlations were found of hysteroid or obsessoid features between the spouses, neither was there any association of these features with the degree of neuroticism.

6. These findings are discussed in relation to the `assortative mating' and `interaction' hypotheses.

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]