Depressed, anxious, mentally ill? You’re more likely to marry someone with the same disorder

Crazy in love just took on a whole new meaning.

A sweeping study found that people with psychiatric disorders are more likely to say “I do” to someone with similar mental health struggles, rather than marry someone without a diagnosis.

“The pattern holds across countries, across cultures, and, of course, generations,” Chun Chieh Fan, co-author of the study and a researcher at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, told Nature. 

Psychiatric disorders are on the rise in the US, affecting a staggering 23.1% of adults in 2022 — up from 18.1% just two decades earlier, according to the National Institute of Mental Health.

Past studies have shown that when one spouse battles mental health issues, the other is two to three times more likely to suffer from stress, anxiety or depression.

But the latest research goes even further, suggesting that mental illness might not just strain relationships, but also play a role in sparking them.

In the study, Fan and his colleagues dug into health records of over 14.8 million people across Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden.

They looked at nine psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, substance-use disorder and anorexia.

The team found that people with psychiatric diagnoses are significantly more likely to marry others with mental illness — and often pair up with someone who has the same condition.

That pattern has only grown stronger over time, increasingly steadily among couples born in the 1930s through the 1990s.

“Despite differences in cultural contexts, patterns of spousal correlation across psychiatric disorders have limited variation between Taiwan and Nordic countries,” the study authors wrote. 

Only a few disorders had regional differences. For example, Taiwanese couples were more likely to share an OCD diagnosis than their Nordic counterparts.

While the study didn’t prove why the mentally ill tend to marry each other, Fan had a few theories.

“Perhaps they better understand each other due to shared suffering, so they attract each other,” he told Nature.

The researchers also pointed to a phenomenon called convergence — where partners grow more alike over time because of shared environments.

And there’s the harsh reality of social stigma, which can shrink the dating pool for those with psychiatric disorders, quietly steering who ends up walking down the aisle.

The study also uncovered a striking finding: Children with two parents who share the same disorder are twice as likely to develop it themselves compared to those with only one affected parent.

The effect was most pronounced in conditions believed to have a genetic component, such as schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder and substance use.

Across the US, 1 in 6 youth ages aged 6 to 17 experience a mental health disorder each year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Psychiatric disorders don’t just affect the mind; they often have a ripple effect throughout a person’s body, their family and even the wider community.

Take depression, for example: People living with it face a 40% higher risk of heart and metabolic diseases compared to the average person.

When it comes to relationships, studies show that in marriages where one partner has a mental health challenge, the chances of divorce are higher — and those odds increase even more when both partners are struggling.