The Mental Health Consequences of Child Marriage: Evidence from Bangladesh

This paper examines the relationship between child marriage and women’s mental health in Bangladesh using nationally representative 2022 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey data on 18,987 ever-married women aged 15–49. Mental health is measured using PHQ-9 depression and GAD-7 anxiety scores. To address non-random selection into early marriage, we estimate doubly robust inverse-probability-weighted regression adjustment models using premarital demographic, geographic, educational, and community-level covariates. In the pooled sample, child marriage has no statistically significant average effect on depression or anxiety after adjustment, despite higher unadjusted scores among child brides. However, this average masks important heterogeneity. Child marriage significantly worsens mental health among women with secondary schooling or above, increasing PHQ-9 scores by 0.224 points and GAD-7 scores by 0.166 points. Threshold estimates show that adverse effects are concentrated among women married before age 14. These findings show that the standard below-18 definition dilutes genuine harm concentrated among the youngest brides and more educated women, with direct implications for prevention policy.