婚姻可能使婚前抑郁的人士抑郁消退

悠然

婚姻可能使婚前抑郁的人士抑郁大幅好转，消除抑郁情绪，这是一项美国社会学研究的调查结果。
这可能是因为婚姻提供了抑郁人士所需要的亲密关系。
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Lonely? Feeling low? Try taking a walk -- down the aisle. Getting married enhances mental health, especially if you're depressed, according to a new U.S. study.
The benefits of marriage for the depressed are particularly dramatic, a finding that surprised the professor-student team behind the study.
"We actually found the opposite of what we expected," said Adrianne Frech, a PhD sociology（社会学）student at Ohio State University who conducted the study with Kristi Williams, an assistant professor of sociology.
They expected to find that one spouse（配偶）'s depression weighed too much on the marriage, but "just mattering to someone else can help alleviate（减轻）symptoms of depression," Frech said.
The researchers used a 3,066 person sample that measured symptoms of depression -- such as an inability to sleep（失眠）, or persistent（持久的）sadness -- in the same people both before and after their first marriage.
They found that depressed people experienced a much more extreme decrease in the incidence of those symptoms.
"Depressed people may be just especially in need of the intimacy（亲密）, the emotional closeness and the social support that marriage can provide ... if you start out happy, you don't have as far to go," Williams said.
On the other hand, if you're not depressed, marriage could have the opposite effect, Frech said.
People who were happy before getting married and end up in a marriage plagued（困扰）by distance or conflict -- qualities associated with a depressed spouse -- might be better off single.
"It seems right to say that people who are not depressed are at risk, that if they marry a depressed person this could be a bad deal for them," Frech said.