DIVORCE AND YOUR HEALTH
THE MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS OF DIVORCE AND WHITNEY HOUSTON'S DEATH by Caxton Opere, MD
Good-bye Whitney. She touched hearts with her music. For some strange reason, writing this brought tears to my eyes. Yes for days since her death, I wanted to write something here on my site and finally summoned the courage three days after the funeral. I am not a blogger and as a busy physician, don't have much time to update browsers about my own books on my web site. I first experienced the real impact of Whitney's music at an intuitive level in the fall of 1995 in Washington DC after I met my beautiful wife. For some strange reason, I knew that there were so many things I wished to say to my wife that words could not express. Deep down in me was this strange feeling that all I needed to do to express how I could truly love my future wife if she married me was to invite her to watch that movie, The Preacher's Wife. It worked and right in that movie theater I asked her if she would marrry me. My wife and I are still married, still in love and crazy about each other today and I am still a preacher!
Divorce kills but hardly anyone listens these days. We just keep going. Whitney is gone and so are many, rich, poor, famous, unknown, young, old, men and women, all dying every day from a broken marriage and a broken heart. They loved the wrong person and paid the ultimate price. Whitney's real crime here is that she loved with her soul and spirit and lost. She became broken-hearted. Perhaps the Tako-Tsubo Syndrome a.k.a Broken Heart Syndrome would have been found on autopsy. Perhaps, she had simply finished her course on earth and it was time to go. Really? The loss was deeper than I thought and I can't imagine then how those close to Whitney now feel about her death and the years preceding it with respect to Boby Brown's relationship with Whitney. There is a music left in our hearts once we hear that beautiful voice once with tunes such as I Will Always Love You. There was no way I could tell my wife I would always love her but hearing I Will Always Love You together for the first time in The Bodyguard just once helped me say it many times over in a way words alone can never express. For my wife, Whitney was an unanswered prayer. Or was it? Only God knows. Of one thing I am almost certain after all these years of researching observing and caring for divorced patients, Whitney Houston's "Cause of Death" was a form of Broken Heart Syndrome.
Whitney, is gone, but Ade & I will always love you.
Adieux.
THE MEDICAL COMPLICATIONS OF DIVORCE
Planning on getting divorced? Think twice. Getting divorced can more than double your chances of death, disease and disability. From increased hospitalization expenses for divorcees to higher recurrence of breast cancer in patients in remission, divorced individuals are at an increased risk for stroke, heart attacks and suicide. There is enough clinical and research evidence that shows divorce is a significant risk factor for a stroke or a heart attack. At this point,the exact reasons behind the medical problems associated with divorce have not yet been fully elucidated in any medical texts. So not surprisingly, this may be your first time of hearing about the medical complications of divorce. 
The psychological trauma resulting from bad marriages and divorce plays an important role in the eventual development of the medical complications of divorce. Such trauma can occur in the marriage, during divorce proceedings or afterwards and can lead to well-defined physiological changes in the body, some of which may be measured fairly consistently. These changes form the template for understanding the medical complications. They will also stop you from underestimating the potential effects of conflicts and psychological trauma on the development of disease. Never mind the pseudoscientists who think there is no relationship between psychological stress and disease. There is more than enough research confirming the relationship between the mind and physical illness. My book How Divorce Kills has over 150 peer-reviewed citations confirming the links between the mind and physical illness.
There are some important principles that will help you understand the potential medical complications of a divorce. SOme of these terms have been described in my fourth book, How Divorce Kills. I have taken some extracts directly from the book to help explain the process. You won't need any convincing to see the link between psychological stress and physical illness. The first terminology you must understand is
Direct Stress Damage
When a man slams a hammer on his thumb and his thumb swells up as he screams in pain, he has experienced a blunt injury accompanied by direct stress damage, (DSD). The second terminology you ought to understand is
Reactivity
Reactivity refers to the bodily response to psychological stress and can be evaluated by measuring heart rate, blood pressure, rate of breathing, resistance to blood flow in the forearm for example. Reactivity may be severe enough to trigger a heart attack and may result from bad relationships or conflict. Reactivity may be Direct, (DR), or Indirect (IR). A divorce, bad marriage or any psychological trauma can create a stress response at any level in the body via direct or indirect reactivity. There is however one problem.
Direct Reactivity
"When your hand is gently pricked with a pin, you will probably respond to the pain by moving away, jumping, screaming “ouch” or saying some other non-printable expletive ‘French’ words. This is Direct Reactivity or DR. Direct reactivity can be viewed as a type of Direct Stress Damage (DSD), except that with DR, there is no lasting damage. Recovery in DR is often instantaneous and the associated pain short-lived. The best way to look at DR is as a response to pain that leaves no scars. DSD may leave you with scars but not DR. Because of its relatively short-lived nature, most of the damage inflicted on our health from a bad marriage or divorce cannot be via Direct Reactivity." Direct Reactivity, can be likened to a response to an injury that leaves no scars.
Indirect Reactivity: Post-Traumatic Stress, Bad Marriages and Physical Illness
Indirect Reactivity is the physiological or pathological response to a remote stressful event long after the event has taken place. Indirect Reactivity is the pathway through which incoming stress signals are incubated and manipulated by the brain to produce effects at a much later time when the signal is naturally expected to have died out. Once these signals are stored and incubated in the organs of incubation in the brain, they can subsequently alter the affected individual’s behavior and body physiology, resulting in death, disease or disability through mental or physical illness. The mental disorders would include violent behavior, personality changes, PTSD and substance abuse. Stressful interactions with others can die out naturally if the person causing them is a transient guest in your life through a physiological process called extinction. But in a marriage, the offending individual is often a spouse, a permanent guest, or may we say parasite, that causes persistent and probably unbearable pain every day and never goes away. The painful signals from such a spouse are incubated in the central nervous system. Incubated signals are therefore an important key to understanding how psychological stress can kill. If we do not want to be damaged by a harmful persistent signal, we must do something with the signal before it is incubated in our nervous system. But if the signal escapes our notice, it may be stored in a place where it can later cause damage via a process called incubation.
"Indirect Reactivity, IR, is the second major pathway through which a divorce or a bad marriage can cause or precipitate physical illness. Indirect Reactivity is poorly understood and often confused with Direct Reactivity. IR is an abnormally prolonged, complex, unpredictable physiologic response to stress or painful stimuli while DR is normal, predictable and short-lived. When exposed to stress, some people may experience the immediate and predictable short-lived Direct Reactivity, while others may experience the more complex unpredictable Indirect Reactivity. IR is the only plausible scientific explanation for why people suffer from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). IR explains why a Vietnam veteran can hide under the table on hearing an airplane fly overhead while at the airport, start screaming and sweating and have a rise in their heart rate and blood pressure decades after leaving Vietnam. This process behind the recurring symptoms in patients withPTSD is the same one that explains why marital conflict or abuse can lead to physical illnesses such as heart disease, stroke and cancer. That's a significant jump in the process of helping you understand how a divorce or bad marriage can lead to physical illness, but you will soon see why this is really so.
How is it that a man who is removed from the battlefield, the site of a traumatic experience still responds as if he was still in the midst of the battle decades later? We can safely say that the traumatic signal is dead thirty years after the event. Yet such dead signals can still produce a significant effect decades after the fact as demonstrated in patients with PTSD. Why?
If we understand and apply the scientific processes behind memory formation and its recall, we will readily appreciate how dead signals can talk and influence behavior or health months or decades later. Once memory for an event has been formed, the initial signal need no longer be present before it can trigger a reaction later in the future. This is because any stressful signal we perceive that generates an acute stress reaction can be integrated into our bodies physiologically via memory formation using protein synthesis."
In a bad marriage, if the traumatic signals are repeated over and over till the individual’s normal physiological and psychological limits are overwhelmed, a nervous breakdown can occur. In the absence of a nervous breakdown however, persistent unbearable stress in a bad marriage can trigger alterations in the normal physiologic mechanisms in the body. Such alterations could manifest as a rise in blood pressure or resting heart rate, high cholesterol, diabetes or chest pain or an increase in biological age. These can be accompanied by increased oxidative stress, toxic free radicals.
Indirect Reactivity
The Brain and Divorce: Storing Our Stress Signals
The brain is the organ in the body responsible for integrating stress signals and sending information to the different target organs in the body. The brain receives, stores and incubates the perceived stress signals of a bad marriage or divorce. There are specific parts of the brain responsible for this incubation process and I like to call them the organs of incubation. Storage of the stress signal is the simplest and easiest to explain of all the functions of the organs of incubation in the brain. It occurs through learning and memory formation. You know that an individual has stored a signal based on what they say or do or how an experience is perceived to have altered their behavior. According to William F. Ganong MD’s renowned text, Medical Review of Physiology, learning is the acquisition of information that enables alteration of behavior while memory is retention and storage of that information. It is possible that you can learn something and within twenty-four hours forget more than ninety percent of what you have learnt. If you change your behavior based on what you have learnt and demonstrate that behavior consistently after you have learnt the material, you must have formed some type of memory for what you have learnt. This may in turn mean you have manufactured some protein to correspond to the type of memory you have formed, especially if the change in behavior is long term.
The hippocampus and amygdalii are two organs of incubation in the brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure in the limbic system, receives information from the outer world. It then combines this information with previous experiences and sends signals to other parts of the body. The amygdala is partly responsible for facial recognition. So if the amygdala suggests that the person in front of you is a dangerously armed serial killer, your response will be a fight-flight fear reaction.
Current scientific thinking appears to be using DSD and DR interchangeably in an attempt to help us understand the possible role of the mind in development of physical illness. It’s no surprise then that they haven’t had much success. We know the mind cannot cause DSD and that DR is too short-lived to be the cause of the chronic diseases associated with divorce. IR is an entirely different entity altogether.
Understanding How A Bad Marriage Can Kill: The Biopsychosocial Model of Disease
The biopsychosocial model of disease shows how negative social interactions, bad marriages or divorce, by triggering psychological stress could cause physical damage to the body in the absence of direct physical contact. Divorce or a bad marriage does not affect an individual's bodily functions in linear or simple fashion. Multiple organs and systems could be affected simultaneously and lead to death, disability or disease. The most basic approach to understanding how divorce and bad arriages affect health revealed in How Divorce Kills is the SP3 approach. Summarized
A SOCIAL INTERACTION leads to a
PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTION that creates an immediate but transient
PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSE which if prolonged can create a
PATHOLOGICAL REACTION
In marriages, anger tops the list of psychological reactions. What does anger really do to your body? That answer can be found in several research findings mentioned in my book. Two are mentioned here.
In the Normative Aging Study, a prospective study at Harvard by Dr. Kawachi and colleagues of 1305 predominantly white male veterans with an average age of 61, anger, a psychological response, was shown to triple the risk of non-fatal heart attacks. This profound revelation led to the subsequent ARIC study of 12, 990 men and women betweent the ages of 45 and 64 with a mix of males and females, Blacks and Whites. The conclusion from this second study was this:psychological stress significantly increased by 1.68 times, the risk of heart disease. How? By the SP3 method above.