ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors ask what happens to individuals who lose their partners either through death or through divorce. There is a great deal of research that firmly links widowhood to steep increases in depression, mental illness, suicide, physical ill health, and even death from natural causes. The authors present evidence on health consequences of divorce and discuss similarities and differences in the impact of divorce and widowhood. The impact of grief on health can therefore never be demonstrated in a single case but only by comparing the health of large numbers of bereaved individuals to that of a nonbereaved control group. Several studies have shown that samples of widowed individuals are significantly more depressed than married controls. The widowed are far more prone to suffer from physical illness than comparable married individuals. Marital status differences in mortality rates again follow the familiar pattern, with divorced individuals having higher rates than the married.
