In 2009, Julea Ward, a teacher and an evangelical Christian, was studying for a master’s degree in counseling at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. As part of her training, she was required to treat clients, and she expressed her reluctance to work with any who were in same-sex relationships. A professor, heeding Ms. Ward’s wishes, referred a gay client to another counselor.

That seemingly simple request became a problem for Ms. Ward when the university expelled her for having made it. Ms. Ward sued, and her case raises the question of whether a counselor’s religious convictions can disqualify her from the profession. ...

The Sixth Circuit decision turns on how common it is to refer patients to other counselors. Ms. Ward argues that one’s religious beliefs are a reasonable reason to refer a client, while the university argues that it has to train students to work with all kinds of clients. The American Counseling Association filed a brief asserting that to habitually refer gay clients would violate its ethical canon.

Ms. Ward referred questions to her lawyer, Jeremy Tedesco of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian legal advocacy organization. Mr. Tedesco said that “if referrals are acceptable, including for many nonreligious-based reasons, they can’t deny someone who has a religion-based need to refer.” He said that Ms. Ward was not singling out gay men and lesbians, and that she would also refuse to affirm heterosexuals who sought counseling about their adultery.

“Does it require a Jewish counselor to affirm the religious beliefs of a Muslim client?” Mr. Tedesco asked. He noted that the American Counseling Association allows its members to choose not to work with terminally ill patients considering end-of-life options. That proves, he said, that counselors are sometimes allowed to refuse to treat clients because of a fraught ethical question — so why not when the question is sexuality, and the counselor is Christian?

What many of the briefs fail to investigate is the role of the counselor or therapist. Is it to “affirm” the client’s beliefs, or to offer support and guidance, even to clients whose practices one may find distasteful or morally wrong?

Labels: culture, discrimination law, homosexuality, mental health, relationships, religion, religious liberty

VOTE

If you’ve been anywhere near an airport bookstore in the last five years, you’ve probably seen the face of Tucker Max leering out at you from one of his two uber-bestselling books. ...

The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.

The narrator seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that his photo appears not only in mugshots, but under the dictionary definition of the word “prick.”

But, love Tucker Max or hate him—it is very likely someone you know has paid money for his writing. His books have sold a staggering 2 million copies combined—around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second. ...

Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties.

Or, I should say, he already has. Unbeknownst to his legions of fans, his legions of critics, or the legions of publishing professionals who want a piece of him, this most public of “I-don’t-wanna-grow-up” males is in fact now in the midst of a serious, intentional and devoted period of cleaning up and growing up.

He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.

What you are about to read is the most in-depth and personal profile of this bestselling and infamous author ever written, based on the most access he has ever given a fellow writer.

It should be abundantly clear from what follows that I’m not a fan of Tucker Max’s writing, nor of his behavior in his twenties.

So why am I writing this? I felt Tucker had an interesting story to tell here, and I wanted to help tell it (no, it’s not another drinking story.) I also have my own personal interest in this story, having to do with how I spent my own twenties. I’ll reveal that towards the end.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", childhood, culture, divorce, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, mental health, parenting, premarital sex, sex, women

VOTE

U.S. married couples experience fewer advantages in psychological well-being and social ties than those who cohabit over time, researchers found.

Study co-authors Kelly Musick of Cornell University's College of Human Ecology and Larry Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said earlier research compared marriage to being single, or compared marriages and cohabitation at a single point in time. This study focused on what changes occur when single men and women move into marriage or cohabitation, and the extent to which any effects of marriage and cohabitation persist over time.

The researchers used data from the National Survey of Families and Households, involving 2,737 single men and women, 896 of whom married or moved in with a partner during the course of six years. ...

"We found that differences between marriage and cohabitation tend to be small and dissipate after a honeymoon period. Also while married couples experienced health gains -- likely linked to the formal benefits of marriage such as shared healthcare plans -- cohabiting couples experienced greater gains in happiness and self-esteem," Musick and Bumpass said in a statement. "For some, cohabitation may come with fewer unwanted obligations than marriage and allow for more flexibility, autonomy and personal growth."

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Marriage, mental health

VOTE

Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

Labels: culture, gay/straight differences, homosexuality, mental health, monogamy, professional associations, religion

VOTE

...But for Susan, it turned out, everything wasn’t fine. While Jesus and the church were pulling her in one direction, the judicial system had made an unwelcome appearance and was pulling her in another. The entire time Susan was in prison, the state of Pennsylvania was running a tab on all the welfare dollars her mother received in her children’s names. Consequently, per state law, Susan was held responsible for the total amount upon her release, and soon the welfare department came calling to get its money back.

In our sessions, Susan showed me a raft of increasingly threatening official letters with eye-popping dollar figures that had her practically hyperventilating. The state wanted in excess of $25,000, and wanted it now.

A hearing was scheduled at the Bucks County Courthouse, where Susan was asked to provide documents proving that she had a job and could start paying her child support debt or face returning to jail in contempt of a court order. Obviously, on her janitor’s survival wages Susan had absolutely no capacity to both pay the state and keep a roof over her head. This Sophie's choice is a common dilemma for tens of thousands of single mothers returning to the community from prison who owe the state for the dollars their children depended on in their mother’s absence. ...

Susan protested the high amount of the monthly support payment, explaining that if she paid the debt she couldn’t afford a place to live. I will never forget how painful it was, watching this woman, who had never in her life caught a single break, have to stand before the American justice system and nearly beg for mercy. But for this black woman in this white judge's courtroom there was no mercy to be had. Her criminal record of violent crime, her drug addiction, her prostitution—all of her vices outweighed the spiritual transformation and personal rehabilitation she had experienced in prison, not to mention her clean-as-a-whistle record in her new life.

The judge merely mocked her, saying, “You’ve got a place to live now: Bucks County Correctional Facility for 90 days.” The public defender tried to interject but the judge was already calling for the next case.

Labels: child support, children, class, culture, mental health, motherhood, parenting, poverty, race, religion

VOTE

Lindsay Reynolds lives in Waterloo, Wis. Even before the recent economic downturn, Reynolds and her husband struggled to make ends meet. They quarreled, especially over money.

"We never had enough income to pay bills, to pay rent. We were constantly late on rent," Reynolds says. "He always wanted to go do things. He wanted to go buy things. And I said, 'No, we can't. We have to be fiscally responsible.' "

As unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent.

Reynolds says that after her husband returned from serving in the Iraq War, he found it hard to find work. They kept moving. Each time, she had to uproot herself and start all over again. Increasingly, as the economy turned sour, it became impossible for her to find a decent job. She says the quarrels intensified.

"The last year of our marriage, it was basically two different people living in the same household," Reynolds says. She was in bad shape: losing weight, down from her usual 135 pounds.

"I got down to 90 pounds," she says. "It wasn't something I chose to do. It's not like I purposely starved myself. This was, 'I could not afford to buy food.' " She felt she had to get out of the marriage. There was only one problem: Filing the paperwork for even a basic divorce cost a few hundred dollars.

"I couldn't afford to get divorced. It wasn't an option because I didn't have the money," she says. ...

The NPR-Kaiser Family Foundation survey found the nation's high unemployment rate has caused rifts within many families: More than a fifth of all Americans who have been out of work for a year or more report that relationships with intimate partners have changed for the worse. More than a third say their economic situation has negatively affected their partners' health and well-being.

Simultaneously, a new paper in the B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis and Policy shows that as unemployment rises, the divorce rate goes down: For every 1 percent increase in the unemployment rate, the divorce rate goes down by 1 percent. ...

Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that multiple studies have found that the marital distress that comes from money problems and feeling trapped is strongly associated with an increased risk of domestic violence.

Labels: culture, divorce, domestic violence, economics, Marriage, mental health, Stephanie Coontz

VOTE

Gay men who live in states where same-sex marriage is legal are healthier, have less stress, make fewer doctor visits and have lower health-care costs, a new study finds.

It included more than 1,200 patients at a large Massachusetts health clinic that provides services for gay men and other sexual minorities.

During the 12 months after the 2003 legalization of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, there was a significant decrease in medical care visits, mental health visits and mental health-care costs among gay and bisexual men, compared to the 12 months before the law changed.

This led to a 13 percent reduction in health-care visits and a 14 percent reduction in health-care costs. The health benefits were similar for single gay men and those with partners.

Labels: culture, gay marriage, Massachusetts, men, mental health

VOTE

...I accept that I'm not meant to be an egg donor. However, I can't help thinking that in a country with so many anti-depressants prescribed, where so many people live long enough to develop cancer (and survive), some women will lie to donate their eggs for guaranteed compensation. As the founders and directors of egg donation agencies I spoke with confirmed, there is no such thing as a donor with a perfect family history. But the agencies are aware of the times we live in, and their screening processes try to assure that huge ethical consequences don't arise because a woman happens to be financially strapped. ...

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) has a set of guiding principles for agencies to consider in donor selection. Red flags include a family history of psychiatric disorders or substance abuse, risk factors for HIV and other STIs, ongoing stress, and marital instability. Still, some variance exists among agencies. "The people who are usually screening potential donors do not have a medical background," explains Fusillo, a former fertility nurse. "For depression, I don't automatically reject someone," Fusillo adds, noting that about 20 to 30 percent of her donors have some depression in their families. Fusillo asks each applicant in-depth questions to ascertain if a person is describing chronic depression or "garden variety living in the United States."

"It would be a complete lie to say donors are not motivated by financial motivation," says Campbell. "But for the donor who gets through the process" -– medical screening, psychological screening, genetic testing, being matched with a couple, interfacing with the egg donation agency and the couple's fertility clinic, legal counseling, hormone injections, egg retrieval –- "their motivation is something bigger, they're doing something more meaningful than just trying to make a quick buck." Of the five donors I interviewed for this story, four of them said money was the catalyst but that they did not turn to egg donation as a "last resort" (the fifth donor waived her fee –- she donated her eggs to secure her brother-in-law and his wife a place at the front of the line to get matched with their own donor).

Labels: culture, donor conception, economics, mental health

VOTE

MANY mothers with a history of serious drug use are still capable of caring for their children, given the right support, a new study has found. But most mothers in the state's methadone programs were not getting the services they needed.

The study found a child was more at risk of abuse or neglect because of a mother's mental health problems and social isolation than from the drug problem itself. ''You can't say all drug-using parents are abusive; some are quite together,'' said the co-author of the study, Stephanie Taplin, a visiting fellow at the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.

Dr Taplin interviewed 171 mothers who attended methadone programs in Sydney over three years. Nearly all had been heroin users, and 37 were still using the drug. Many were caring for children but a third had at least one child under 16 removed by Community Services; about half had been given up at birth.

Dr Taplin found mothers, regardless of the severity of their drug problem, were less likely to have children removed if they were in daily contact with their own mothers, were not on medication for mental health problems such as depression and had fewer children. ...

The women, average age 37, came from deeply disadvantaged backgrounds, the study found. Two-thirds had experienced physical or sexual abuse, and more than a third an ''upsetting sexual experience with a relative or person in authority''. On average the abuse had occurred at age 10.

Labels: children, grandparents, mental health, motherhood, parenting, sexual assault

VOTE

Former Georgia Chief Justice Leah Sears (on the short list for Obama appointments to the Supreme Court) and family relations scholar Professor William Doherty have teamed up to produce with what they call, without irony, a modest proposal to reduce “unnecessary divorce”: the Second Chances Act.

The Second Chances Act is a brilliant piece of work by two of the nation’s leading pro-marriage liberals. (Full disclosure: The authors kindly give me far more credit than I am due by including me in a list of people to be thanked for “contributions,” which in my case consisted of attending one meeting in which an early draft of the report and the legislation was presented.)

The Second Chances Act proposes new model legislation that includes a one-year waiting period for divorce, along with a requirement that parents of minor children considering divorce take a short online divorced parenting education course, which would include information on reconciliation. Spouses could trigger the one-year waiting period without actually filing for divorce by sending their mates a formal letter of notice. These requirements would be waived in cases of domestic violence.

Now, some might ask, “Unnecessary divorce? What’s that?”

The genesis of the Second Chances Act was Minnesota Judge Bruce Peterson’s observation that at least some of the people he was seeing in his court looked like they needed a “rest stop” on the “divorce superhighway.” “When Judge Peterson looked at his own court system, widely acknowledged as a progressive one,” Sears and Doherty write, “he saw attempts to meet nearly every need of divorcing couples—legal and financial assistance, protection orders, parenting education, and more—except for reconciliation.”

The assumption of the entire legal system is that by the time a person files for divorce, the marriage is already dead. Amazingly, no one really even asked how many people filing for divorce would be interested in reconciliation.

So Doherty teamed up with colleagues to do some groundbreaking and original research, testing that assumption.

What they found shocked the family law community: “New research shows that about 40 percent of U.S. couples already well into the divorce process say that one or both of them are interested in the possibility of reconciliation.” In about 10 percent of divorces, both the husband and the wife are interested in reconciliation (likely unbeknownst to either of them).

Labels: children, divorce, divorce reform, government interest in marriage, Marriage, marriage counseling, mental health, Second Chances Act

VOTE

Focusing too heavily on the "for richer" part of the nuptial vows could spell disaster for a marriage, according to research published today by Brigham Young University.

In a survey of 1,700 married couples, researchers found that couples in which one or both partners placed a high priority on getting or spending money were much less likely to have satisfying and stable marriages. ...

Researchers gauged materialism using self-report surveys that asked questions such as to what extent do you agree with these statements? "I like to own things to impress people" or "money can buy happiness." Spouses were then surveyed on aspects of their marriage. ...

Study authors and marriage experts noted that the findings probably have to do with the personality traits that go along with materialism. They will be published today in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy.

"The finding does not necessarily mean that it is the materialism itself that damages their relationships. ... A materialistic orientation may be associated with other unidentified factors, such as childhood deprivation or neglect, which might play a more pivotal role in adult marital satisfaction," said Don Catherall, professor of clinical psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University in Chicago. "Of course, it may also simply mean that people who are more focused on making money have less energy and interest left to invest in their marriages."

Other studies have shown that materialism is correlated with a host of personality traits and interpersonal skills that might hinder a marriage.

"People who are materialistic tend to be narcissistic and concerned with impressing people," said Susan Heitler, a Denver-based clinical psychologist and creator of marriage resource site Poweroftwomarriage.com. "They have a tendency to be anxious, depressed, have relatively poor relationship skills and have low self-esteem. These qualities in turn can cause marital problems."

Labels: culture, Marriage, mental health

VOTE

The world's largest organization of psychologists took its strongest stand to date supporting full marriage equity, a move that observers say will have a far-reaching impact on the national debate.

The policymaking body of the American Psychological Association (APA) unanimously approved the resolution 157-0 on the eve of the group's annual convention, which opens here today. ...

The resolution points to numerous recent studies, including findings that "many gay men and lesbians, like their heterosexual counterparts, desire to form stable, long-lasting and committed intimate relationships and are successful in doing so."

It adds that "emerging evidence suggests that statewide campaigns to deny same-sex couples legal access to civil marriage are a significant source of stress to the lesbian, gay and bisexual residents of those states and may have negative effects on their psychological well-being."

Labels: culture, gay marriage, mental health, professional associations

VOTE

Want a successful marriage? Make sure you have sex when you're ready.

According to a new study, women who are sexually active early in their adolescence--specifically, before age 16--are more likely to divorce.

Researchers at the University of Iowa used the responses of 3,793 women who are married or have been married at some point in their lives from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth to examine the relationship between the age at which they had their first sexual experience, and the success of their first marriage.

At first glance, the findings seemed alarming: multiple outlets (including this one), reported that up to 47 percent of women who lost their virginity during their teen years divorced within 10 years of getting married--implying that women who lose their virginity during adolescence will inevitably face conflict in their later adult relationships.

In fact, while the age at which sex first occurred was significant in determining women’s likelihood to divorce, more important was whether that sex qualified as “wanted." That's because the earlier women had their first sexual experience, the less frequently the sex was actually wanted. In short, the study's conclusions were less about the correlation between when a girl loses her virginity and her risk of divorce than it was about how the nature of the first sexual experience affects later romantic relationships.

While some of the initial reports about the study alluded to this point, they often did not explore it completely, so we decided to go to the source--lead researcher Anthony Paik--to shed more light on this surprisingly complicated study. ...

HP: How is “unwanted” sex defined?

AP: The survey [results are culled from] the CDC’s 2002 Survey of Family Growth. It has a couple of questions that ask for the context of first intercourse—that it “caused mixed feelings,” that it “wasn’t completely wanted,” or that it “was completely wanted.” It’s not clear from the survey what the womens' experience was specifically. ...

HP: Why would unwanted sexual experiences be associated with divorce?

AP: There are two arguments: one is that it’s a PTSD process, which is a psychological model of a post-traumatic stress syndrome process [stemming from] childhood sex abuse. This model emphasizes that these experiences, particularly with adults, are traumatic, [and] lead to high levels of sexualization [which] makes individuals susceptible to relationship difficulties.

In the second argument, unwanted sexual experiences lead to early sexualization, which is associated with subsequent life-course events that are key divorce determinants, such as having more sex partners, premarital conceptions, and premarital births.

Labels: adolescence, culture, divorce, girls, Marriage, mental health, out-of-wedlock births, sex, sexual assault

VOTE

Between unresolved family conflicts, relationship struggles and his mixed-race identity, James Puckett had enough on his mind in college that he sought professional help. But after bouncing from one therapist to another, he still felt stuck.

“They were all female, and they did give me some comfort,” said Mr. Puckett, 30, who works for a domestic-abuse program in Wisconsin. “But I was getting the same rhetoric about changing my behavior without any challenge to see the bigger picture of what was behind these very male coping reactions, like putting your hand through a wall.”

He decided to seek out a male therapist instead, and found that there were few of them. “I’m just glad I ended up with the person I did,” said Mr. Puckett, who is no longer in therapy, “because for me it made all the difference.”

Researchers began tracking the “feminization” of mental health care more than a generation ago, when women started to outnumber men in fields like psychology and counseling. Today the takeover is almost complete.

Men earn only one in five of all master’s degrees awarded in psychology, down from half in the 1970s. They account for less than 10 percent of social workers under the age of 34, according to a recent survey. And their numbers have dwindled among professional counselors — to 10 percent of the American Counseling Association’s membership today from 30 percent in 1982 — and appear to be declining among marriage and family therapists. ...

The impact of this gender switch on the value of therapy is negligible, studies suggest. A good therapist is a good therapist, male or female, and a mediocre one is a mediocre one. Shared experience may even be an impediment, in some cases: therapists often caution students against assuming that they have special insight into person’s problems just because they have something in common.

Still, perception is all important when it comes to seeking help for the very first time. In a recent study among 266 college men, Ronald F. Levant, a psychologist at the University of Akron, found that a man’s willingness to seek therapy was directly related to how strongly he agreed with traditionally male assumptions, like “I can usually handle whatever comes my way.” Such a man on the fence about seeking treatment could be discouraged by the prospect of talking to a woman.

Labels: culture, gender, gender differences, men, mental health, professional associations

VOTE

Is marriage bad for your mental health? Fox News expert Dr. Keith Ablow says so.

He lauds Cameron Diaz's claim that marriage is a "dying institution," and goes on to say that in his clinical judgment "marriage is (as it has been for decades now) a source of real suffering for the vast majority of married people."

The vast majority?

Dr. Ablow further asserts, "without a doubt" (and also without evidence), that marriage is "one of the leading causes of major depression in the nation," and points to marriage's status as a legal union as a key cause. Because the law makes it harder to leave a marriage, marriage deprives men and women of what he calls "the joy of being 'chosen' on a daily basis." If marriage had no legal status, he states, marriages would feel "less confining."

Dr. Ablow has impressive credentials. His website calls him "one of America's leading psychiatrists," and an assistant professor at Tufts Medical School. ...

A particularly persuasive study of "union formation and depression" by Kathleen Lamb and Gary Lee appeared in the Journal of Marriage and Family in November 2003. According to the authors, "Many studies have established that married people fare better than their never-married counterparts in terms of psychological well-being." The study then used two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to test whether marriage reduces depression or whether depressed people are less likely to marry. The study concludes there is "no evidence of selection of less depressed persons into either marriage or cohabitation, but a negative effect of entry into marriage on depression, particularly when marriage was not preceded by cohabitation" -- i.e., marriage reduced depression.

Labels: cohabitation, culture, Maggie Gallagher, Marriage, mental health

VOTE

In previous studies by our group, we found that female offspring of parental divorce and parental remarriage are more susceptible to suicide attempt than male offspring. In this study, we examine whether these findings remain even after controlling for offspring depression. The sample consists of respondents from the 2001–2002 National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Multivariable regressions controlled for offspring depression, parental depression, age, race/ethnicity, income, and marital status. Our previous findings that female offspring of parental divorce and parental remarriage are more likely to report a lifetime suicide attempt than male offspring remained even after controlling for offspring depression. Findings suggest that focusing on engaging female offspring who demonstrate symptoms of depression is not sufficient to reduce suicide attempt risk in this group as many at risk individuals will remain unrecognized.

Labels: culture, divorce, gender differences, Marriage, men, mental health, women

VOTE

"Lazar Greenfield, M.D. is no ordinary surgeon. Until last week, he was the president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, and was also the lead editor of the Surgery News. In the February issue, he penned some thoughts on Valentine's Day under the heading of 'Gut Feelings.' Greenfield proceeded to then discuss the mating habits of fruit flies, and the rotifer. In each case, Dr. Greenfield made sure to reference to the scientific literature. Then he turned his attention to humans. Dr. Greenfield noted the therapeutic effects of semen, citing research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior which found that female college students practicing unprotected sex were less likely to suffer from depression than those whose partners used condoms (as well as those who remained abstinent). His comments apparently didn't sit well in certain quarters. Dr. Greenfield was forced to resign as editor of the Surgery News and gave up his stewardship of ACS after learning that his article had spurred threats of protests from outside women's groups."

Labels: abstinence, culture, heterosexual couples, men, mental health, professional associations, sex, universities, women

VOTE

Two failed marriages were the cost of war for Sgt. Jennifer Schobey.

The breaking point in her first marriage came when her husband deployed to Afghanistan, the last in a long line of separations they had endured as they juggled two military careers. Schobey married another combat veteran, but eventually that union failed under the weight of two cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — his and hers. They are now getting divorced.

Separations. Injuries. Mental health issues. All are added weights to the normal strains of marriage.

For women in the military, there's a cold, hard reality: Their marriages are more than twice as likely to end in divorce as those of their male comrades — and up to three times as likely for enlisted women. And military women get divorced at higher rates than their peers outside the military, while military men divorce at lower rates than their civilian peers.

About 220,000 women have served in Afghanistan and Iraq in roles ranging from helicopter pilots to police officers. Last year, 7.8 percent of women in the military got a divorce, compared with 3 percent of military men, according to Pentagon statistics. Among the military's enlisted corps, nearly 9 percent of women saw their marriages end, compared with a little more than 3 percent of the men.

Like all divorces, the results can be a sense of loss and a financial blow. But for military women, a divorce can be a breaking point — even putting them at greater risk for homelessness down the road.

It has an effect, too, on military kids. The military has more single moms than dads, and an estimated 30,000 of them have deployed in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Labels: culture, divorce, gender, gender differences, Marriage, marriage counseling, men, mental health, motherhood, single parenting, women

VOTE

The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.

In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.

Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened. ...

Other findings in the survey underscore the degree to which the economy is weighing on college students.

“Paternal unemployment is at the highest level since we started measuring,” said John Pryor, director of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at U.C.L.A.’s Higher Education Research Institute, which does the annual freshman survey. “More students are taking out loans. And we’re seeing the impact of not being able to get a summer job, and the importance of financial aid in choosing which college they’re going to attend.” ...

In addition, Professor Sax has explored the role of the faculty in college students’ emotional health, and found that interactions with faculty members were particularly salient for women. Negative interactions had a greater impact on their mental health.

“Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them,” she said. “It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.”

She added: “And while men who challenged their professor’s ideas in class had a decline in stress, for women it was associated with a decline in well-being.”

Labels: culture, economics, gender, gender differences, men, mental health, universities, women

VOTE

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Using birth, death and marriage records, Farr analyzed the relative mortality rates of the three groups at various ages. The work, a groundbreaking study that helped establish the field of medical statistics, showed that the unmarried died from disease “in undue proportion” to their married counterparts. And the widowed, Farr found, fared worst of all.

Farr’s was among the first scholarly works to suggest that there is a health advantage to marriage and to identify marital loss as a significant risk factor for poor health. Married people, the data seemed to show, lived longer, healthier lives. “Marriage is a healthy estate,” Farr concluded. “The single individual is more likely to be wrecked on his voyage than the lives joined together in matrimony.”

While Farr’s own study is no longer relevant to the social realities of today’s world — his three categories exclude couples living together, gay couples and the divorced, for instance — his overarching finding about the health benefits of marriage seems to have stood the test of time. Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.) But in the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people.

Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia. A study of two dozen causes of death in the Netherlands found that in virtually every category, ranging from violent deaths like homicide and car accidents to certain forms of cancer, the unmarried were at far higher risk than the married. For many years, studies like these have influenced both politics and policy, fueling national marriage-promotion efforts, like the Healthy Marriage Initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. From 2006 to 2010, the program received $150 million annually to spend on projects like “divorce reduction” efforts and often cited the health benefits of marrying and staying married.

But while it’s clear that marriage is profoundly connected to health and well-being, new research is increasingly presenting a more nuanced view of the so-called marriage advantage. Several new studies, for instance, show that the marriage advantage doesn’t extend to those in troubled relationships, which can leave a person far less healthy than if he or she had never married at all. One recent study suggests that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit. And despite years of research suggesting that single people have poorer health than those who marry, a major study released last year concluded that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced. ...

Does marrying again benefit those who divorce, in terms of health? In the Chicago study, remarriage helped only a little. It seemed to heal emotional wounds: the remarried had about the same risk for depression as the continuously married. But a second marriage didn’t seem to be enough to repair the physical damage associated with marital loss. Compared with the continuously married, people in second marriages still had 12 percent more chronic health problems and 19 percent more mobility problems. “I don’t think anyone would encourage people to stay in a marriage that is really making them miserable,” says Linda J. Waite, a University of Chicago sociologist and an author of the study. “But try harder to make it better.” Even if marital problems seem small, Waite says, the data suggest it’s wise to intervene early and try to resolve them. “If you learn to how to manage disagreement early,” she says, “then you can avoid the decline in marital happiness that follows from the drip, drip of negative interactions.”

Labels: divorce, gender differences, Marriage, mental health, remarriage

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