Intersecting Crises: Medical rehabilitation trajectories around Divorce

Carla Rowold , Hertie-School
Sarah Schmauk, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

While previous research has examined health trajectories around divorce, it has largely focused on mean within-individual changes, offering limited insight into how health develops throughout the divorce process. Using rich and novel register data for Germany, this study asks: What are the most common rehabilitation trajectories around divorce, and how do they differ by gender? Focusing on divorcees who experienced at least one rehabilitation stay in the years surrounding divorce, we adopt a life-course perspective to trace typical patterns in the timing, diagnosis, and sequencing of rehabilitation experiences through Sequence and Cluster Analysis. Our study contributed to previous literature by revealing distinct rehabilitation trajectories spanning three years before to five years after divorce, differentiating between mental and various physical diagnoses. By employing rehabilitation episodes as a proxy for severe and interruptive health events, the study extends prior research that primarily relied on softer health indicators such as medical consultations or self-rated health. Drawing on high-quality administrative data from the German Pension Insurance, we also provide register-based evidence for Germany on the interplay between divorce and severe health events. Finally, we focus on potential gender differences in these trajectories, complementing and extending previous, often mixed, findings on gendered health consequences of marital dissolution. Preliminary descriptive results indicate highly gendered rehabilitation trajectories: women are more likely to experience rehabilitation stays for mental disorders in the years around and after divorce, whereas men more often undergo rehabilitation due to substance-abuse, particularly in the year of divorce.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session P6. Health, Mortality, and Ageing 2