Suicide Fact-Check: What Does Marital Status Have to Do with It?
We’ve been led to believe that marrying protects us from wanting to take our own lives. I looked at the data.
Ever since I started studying single life, there is a name that has been tossed at me with some regularity: Emile Durkheim. He was the French sociologist who in 1897 said that unmarried people die by suicide more often than married people do. Marriage, he believed, provided a measure of social integration in a society that single people lacked. Getting divorced disrupts your life and decreases social integration, so that also increases your risk of taking your own life.
Matrimaniacs believe these kinds of things, and they claim that Durkheim’s conclusions from the late 1800s are still true today. They even have studies to point to in supposed support of their boasts. The authors of The Case for Marriage, who got so much wrong that I could have devoted every chapter of Singled Out to a critique instead of just one, said that “both widowed and divorced persons were about three times as likely to commit suicide as the married were” and that “never-married” people also die by suicide more often than married people do.
You know where I’m going with this. I actually studied the studies!
