Will My Marriage End in Divorce Because of Depression?

Picture a couple in their late twenties, married a few years, waiting on their first child with real excitement. The last thing on their minds is trouble. Yet trouble shows up anyway sometimes, often through a new mother who feels buried by everything and slides into depression. As she sinks further, her husband can turn jittery, short-tempered, resentful. He starts to feel like the whole household rests on his shoulders, and he reads her withdrawal as neglect of the baby. When depression takes hold of one person in a couple, the other rarely stays untouched. The strain spreads, and the family as a whole pays for it.

The National Institute of Mental Health reports that millions of American adults live through a major depressive episode in any given year. How often depression lands on just one half of a couple is harder to pin down; the numbers are fuzzy. What is clear is that it pushes plenty of couples into a counselor's office, because the weight of a mental illness starts to feel like it could crack the marriage open.

So does depression guarantee divorce? No. The split, when it comes, usually grows out of what gets left unattended rather than the depression by itself. Leave it alone long enough and other things start breaking. An affair, for instance. Or one partner gets so low they stop working, and that single fact sets off a chain of problems that eventually ends the marriage.

Is there a way through? Yes. Couples have to name the depression and work at understanding how it lands on each of them differently. They need to go back to whatever reason pulled them together in the first place, and they need to keep talking to each other instead of going quiet. And when it's beyond what they can manage on their own, they need to get professional help.

Depending on how bad it gets, the depressed partner may more or less check out. Sleep too much or barely at all. Up pacing in the middle of the night, then dead to the world in the afternoon. Holding a conversation becomes hard. Concentrating becomes hard. They often carry a heavy sense of being to blame for the whole mess while feeling powerless to fix any of it. A lot of the time they couldn't even tell you why they feel this way. Meanwhile the other partner might be patient and willing, picking up the slack, which only gets heavier when there are kids in the house.

Can it make a marriage angry? It can. The more the depressed partner pulls back, the more worn down and frustrated the other one becomes. The non-depressed partner ends up doing things solo, stuck at home when they'd rather be out together as a couple, and that breeds its own kind of irritation. People fall in love partly because they have a good time together and like each other's company. Strip that away and it gets hard to feel for the person who's hurting. The healthy partner can even feel cheated, since depression so often reads as not caring about the relationship at all. Add in a loss of interest in sex and physical closeness, and if months or years roll by like this, both of them start to notice the gap between them widening.

Try to find where the depression is coming from. The source can hint at how long it might last. A recent death in the family, say, could mean the low period passes in a few weeks. But if it traces back to changes in the brain and underlying mental illness, the suffering may stretch on for years. One signal worth watching: depression that keeps returning with no obvious trigger you can point to, which may mean something is churning in the person's private thoughts that isn't visible from the outside.

What actually helps? Therapy. Talking the depression through, alone or alongside a partner, tends to surface other things buried in the marriage, and dealing with those can loosen the depression's grip. Going in together gives a couple a useful vantage point, because lifting the depression and repairing the marriage often turn out to be the same project. The gap between individual therapy and couples therapy for treating the symptoms themselves is sometimes small, but couples work tends to do more to take pressure off the relationship overall.

If talk therapy on its own isn't moving the needle, a doctor might add an antidepressant to the mix. The medication can take the edge off the physical symptoms while the therapy builds awareness of the emotional and situational roots of the problem. For milder depression, a doctor may go with one or the other instead of both at once.

What usually happens over the long haul? More often than not, when the depression drags on for years, the healthy partner runs out of steam and files for divorce. Less often, they stay, even as the marriage quietly turns them into more of a caretaker than a spouse. The couples who make it tend to be the ones who name the depression as the actual problem, treat it, and refuse to stop talking to each other.

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