ArticleSSM - population health2018
Cohabitation and mental health: Is psychotropic medication use more common in cohabitation than marriage?
Article in SSM - population health, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
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- The association between early marriage and mental disorder among young migrant and non-migrant women: a Norwegian register-based study.BMC women's health · 2022Article
- Changing associations of coronary heart disease incidence with current partnership status and marital history over three decades.SSM - population health · 2022Article
- Mental disorder and first-time marriage formation among non-Western migrant women: A national register study.SSM - population health · 2022Article
- Sexual and reproductive health knowledge, sexual attitudes, and sexual behaviour of university students: Findings of a Beijing-Based Survey in 2010-2011.Archives of public health = Archives belges de sante publique · 2021Article
- Living alone, loneliness and lack of emotional support as predictors of suicide and self-harm: A nine-year follow up of the UK Biobank cohort.Journal of affective disorders · 2021Article
- Mental health and illness of medical students and newly graduated doctors during the pandemic of SARS-Cov-2/COVID-19.PloS one · 2021Article
- "Go See Somebody": How Spouses Promote Mental Health Care.Society and mental health · 2020Article
- The relationship between living arrangements and higher use of hospital care at middle and older ages: to what extent do observed and unobserved individual characteristics explain this association?BMC public health · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Marriage is associated with better mental health. While research on the mental health of cohabiting individuals has increased in recent years, it has yielded mixed results thus far. We assessed whether the mental health of cohabiters is comparable to that of married individuals or those living alone using longitudinal data on psychotropic medication purchases. Panel data from an 11% random sample of the population residing in Finland for the years 1995 to 2007, with annual measurements of all covariates, were used. Ordinary least squares (OLS) models were applied to disentangle the relation between cohabitation and psychotropic medication purchases while controlling for relevant time-varying factors (age, education, economic activity, and number of children), and individual fixed effects (FE) models to further account for unobserved time-invariant individual factors. Our sample consisted of 63,077 men and 61,101 women aged 25 to 39 years in 1995. Descriptive results and the OLS model indicated that the likelihood of purchasing psychotropic medication was lowest for married individuals, higher for cohabiters, and highest for individuals living alone. This difference between cohabiting and married individuals disappeared after controlling for time-varying covariates (percent difference [% diff] for men: 0.3, 95% confidence interval [CI]: -0.0, 0.6; % diff for women: -0.2, 95% CI: -0.6, 0.2). Further controlling for unobserved confounders in the FE models did not change this non-significant difference between cohabiting and married individuals. The excess purchases of psychotropic medication among individuals living alone compared to those cohabiting decreased to 1.2 (95% CI: 1.0, 1.4) and 1.4 (95% CI: 1.1, 1.6) percentage-points in the fully-adjusted FE model for men and women, respectively. Similar results were found for all subcategories of psychotropic medication. In summary, these findings suggested that the mental health difference between cohabiting and married individuals, but not the difference between cohabiting individuals and those living alone, was largely due to selection.
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