Anxiety and Depression After Infidelity: Emotional Reactions, Risk, and When to Seek Help

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Author: Ukrainian Psychological Hub · Published: September 27, 2026 · Editorial Policy

Anxiety, sadness, anger, confusion, loss of appetite, poor sleep, difficulty concentrating, and periods of depressed mood can all occur after discovering a partner’s infidelity. These reactions can be intense without automatically meaning that a person has an anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder. Infidelity is a relationship event, not a psychiatric diagnosis, and the severity of the emotional aftermath varies widely from one person to another.

Research does show a meaningful mental-health signal. In a probability-sampled but highly distressed subgroup of married or cohabiting U.S. adults, discovery of a partner affair was associated with a higher likelihood of a past-year major depressive episode. The study’s author emphasized that the sample was selected for low relationship satisfaction and included only 13 people who reported affair discovery, so the effect estimate should not be treated as a general-population risk figure. Whisman’s study supports careful clinical attention to depression after affair discovery, not the conclusion that infidelity inevitably causes depression.

The practical question is therefore not whether your reaction is “normal enough.” The useful questions are how severe the symptoms are, how long they persist, how much they interfere with sleep, work, parenting, eating, relationships, and safety, and whether you need additional support. If you have just discovered infidelity and need immediate practical guidance, see I Found Out My Partner Cheated: What to Do First After Discovering Infidelity. For the broader definition of infidelity and its boundaries, see What Is Infidelity? Meaning, Types, Examples, and What Research Shows.

Key Points

• Anxiety and depressed mood can follow infidelity, but emotional pain after betrayal is not itself a diagnosis.

• Research links affair discovery with depressive symptoms, anxiety, distress, and in some samples major depressive episodes, but the evidence base is still limited and does not establish a universal causal pathway.

• Major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, and OCD each require their own diagnostic criteria. Infidelity, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, worry, or sadness alone do not establish any of those disorders.

• Screening tools such as the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 can help quantify symptoms, but a score is not the same as a clinical diagnosis.

• Seek professional help when symptoms are persistent, worsening, hard to manage, or interfering with everyday functioning. Seek urgent help for suicidal thoughts, inability to stay safe, severe behavioral disorganization, or immediate danger.

• Recovery has no fixed timetable. Getting help does not obligate you to reconcile, forgive, stay, separate, or make a relationship decision on someone else’s schedule.

What Anxiety After Infidelity Can Feel Like

Anxiety after infidelity often centers on uncertainty and threat: What else do I not know? Can I trust what I am being told? What happens to my relationship, home, finances, family, or future? A person may feel restless, tense, easily startled, irritable, unable to settle, or unable to stop mentally reviewing what happened. Sleep may become lighter or fragmented, concentration may deteriorate, and ordinary tasks may suddenly require much more effort.

These experiences overlap with symptoms found in anxiety disorders, but overlap is not equivalence. The National Institute of Mental Health distinguishes ordinary or stress-related anxiety from generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), which involves excessive, difficult-to-control worry across multiple areas of life, typically occurring more days than not for at least six months and causing meaningful impairment. Event-focused anxiety in the days or weeks after affair discovery can be severe without meeting that pattern.

The six-month diagnostic duration for GAD is not a waiting period for care. If anxiety is disrupting your life now, you can seek help now. A clinician can assess the symptoms that are actually present rather than forcing them into a label prematurely.

Anxiety can fluctuate

A person may feel relatively calm for several hours and then experience a surge after a reminder, a conversation, a new piece of information, sexual contact, a location, a date, or an unexpected message. Fluctuation does not mean the distress is invented or that recovery is failing. It means symptoms can be cue-sensitive and change across situations.

At the same time, an intense reaction to a reminder should not be used by itself to diagnose PTSD, panic disorder, OCD, or another condition. The specific diagnostic pattern matters.

What Depression After Infidelity Can Look Like

Depressive reactions may include sadness, emptiness, hopelessness, guilt, shame, loss of interest, low energy, withdrawal, difficulty concentrating, sleep changes, appetite changes, or a sense that the future has collapsed. The NIMH depression guide notes that clinical depression is defined by a broader pattern of symptoms, duration, severity, and functional impact. For a depressive disorder diagnosis, clinicians also consider other possible explanations, including medical conditions, medications, substance use, bipolar-spectrum symptoms, grief, and other stress-related responses.

A period of crying, low mood, exhaustion, or loss of appetite after betrayal can therefore be a significant emotional reaction without automatically being major depressive disorder. Conversely, calling the symptoms “just heartbreak” can also miss a clinically important depressive episode. The correct distinction comes from assessment, not from minimizing or dramatizing the event.

Depressed mood and major depressive disorder are different levels of description

“I feel depressed” can describe an emotional state. A major depressive episode is a clinical syndrome with defined symptom, duration, and impairment requirements. NIMH notes that depression diagnosis generally requires symptoms most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks, with depressed mood or loss of interest or pleasure among the core features. A clinician still has to evaluate the full pattern and rule out other explanations.

You do not have to wait until you clearly meet every diagnostic criterion before asking for help. Subthreshold symptoms can still be painful and impairing, and earlier support can be appropriate.

What Research Actually Shows About Depression and Anxiety After Infidelity

The strongest conclusion supported by the literature is modest but important: people who discover or experience partner infidelity can show substantial psychological distress, including depression and anxiety symptoms, and some studies find associations with clinically significant depression. The research does not justify a single prevalence number for “depression after cheating,” nor does it show that everyone follows the same course.

A probability-sample study found an association with major depressive episodes

In Whisman’s 2016 Family Process study, 227 married or cohabiting adults from a probability-sampled U.S. cohort were studied because they scored below the midpoint on marital satisfaction. Thirteen reported discovering a partner affair in the prior 12 months. Affair discovery was associated with past-year major depressive episode even after adjustment for demographics and marital adjustment. The adjusted odds ratio remained statistically significant, but the confidence interval was wide because so few participants reported discovery.

This is valuable evidence because the parent cohort was probability sampled and depression was assessed diagnostically. It is also narrow evidence: the analytic sample was a small, already distressed subgroup, the design was cross-sectional, and the study cannot determine whether affair discovery caused the depressive episode.

A small study of humiliating marital events found more depression and anxiety

Cano and O’Leary studied 25 women who had recently experienced a severe humiliating marital event—defined as a husband’s infidelity or a threat of marital dissolution—and 25 comparison participants with similar marital discord. The exposed group was more likely to have a major depressive episode and reported more nonspecific depression and anxiety symptoms. The study is often cited in infidelity research, but it should not be presented as an infidelity-only estimate because the exposure category combined infidelity and separation threats, the sample was small, and all participants were women.

Appraisals and mental health were linked in a college sample

In a study of 232 college students who had recently been cheated on, Shrout and Weigel found relationships among negative appraisals, depression, anxiety, distress, and health-compromising behaviors. Self-blame and other appraisals were part of the statistical pathways examined. Because the study was observational and based on college students, it does not show that a particular thought pattern is the single cause of post-infidelity depression or anxiety. It does support paying attention to how people interpret the event, especially when those interpretations become globally self-condemning or hopeless.

Trauma-like symptoms can co-occur with depression, but that does not make PTSD automatic

A small study of 73 unmarried young adults who had experienced partner infidelity found high levels of post-traumatic stress symptoms and an association between those symptoms and depressive symptoms. Roos and colleagues reported that 45.2% of their sample screened as having symptoms suggestive of probable infidelity-related PTSD. That figure belongs to a small, young, selected sample and came from symptom screening; it is not a population prevalence estimate and it does not mean that 45% of people who experience infidelity have diagnosable PTSD. Anxiety findings in the study were mixed.

This distinction matters. “Betrayal trauma” is used as a theoretical and research framework, not as a DSM or ICD diagnosis. “Post-infidelity stress disorder” is not an official DSM or ICD diagnosis. Intrusive memories, hypervigilance, anxiety, sleep disruption, or trauma-like distress after infidelity can be clinically important without establishing PTSD.

Longitudinal data show that the story is more complex than simple cause and effect

A large German longitudinal study followed relationship and personal well-being around roughly 1,000 reported infidelity events. Stavrova, Pronk, and Denissen found that declines in several aspects of well-being often preceded the reported infidelity event, and trajectories differed across people and outcomes. The study is a reminder that cross-sectional associations cannot be turned into a simple deterministic story in which infidelity alone explains every later mental-health symptom—or in which prior relationship difficulty excuses infidelity.

The practical takeaway is that post-infidelity distress deserves assessment on its own terms. Research can identify associations and risk patterns. It cannot tell an individual person what diagnosis they have, how long they will feel distressed, whether their relationship will survive, or whether reconciliation is the right choice.

Why Infidelity Can Affect Mood and Anxiety So Strongly

Infidelity can disrupt several psychologically important systems at once: attachment and trust, assumptions about the relationship, expectations about the future, sexual and emotional safety, social identity, practical plans, and the reliability of information. For some people, the event also carries humiliation, public exposure, financial consequences, sexually transmitted infection concerns, or major changes in housing and family life.

These pressures can plausibly contribute to anxiety and depressed mood through multiple routes rather than one infidelity-specific mechanism. Uncertainty can sustain worry. Sleep loss can worsen emotional regulation and concentration. Shame and self-blame can intensify low mood. Repetitive mental review can keep attention anchored to threat. Social withdrawal can remove sources of support. None of these pathways is inevitable, and none proves a disorder.

It is also important to separate explanation from blame. Research on why people engage in infidelity identifies multiple correlates and motives; it does not establish that a betrayed partner’s appearance, personality, sexual behavior, mental health, attachment style, or relationship performance “caused” another person to violate an agreement. For the evidence on motives and predictors, see Why Do People Cheat? Motives, Opportunity, Relationship Factors, and Research. Associations and reported motives should not be converted into deterministic causes.

Normal Emotional Distress, Symptoms, Screening, and Diagnosis

Mental-health language becomes more useful when it describes the level of evidence accurately. After infidelity, four different statements can all be true at different times: a person can have an understandable emotional reaction; they can have clinically relevant symptoms; they can screen above a threshold on a questionnaire; or they can meet criteria for a diagnosed disorder. Those are related categories, not interchangeable ones.

An emotional reaction

Shock, anger, grief, fear, sadness, jealousy, disgust, confusion, temporary appetite changes, and difficulty sleeping can occur as responses to a painful relational event. Their presence alone does not define a mental disorder.

A symptom

A symptom is a more specific psychological or physical experience such as persistent low mood, anhedonia, excessive worry, panic episodes, insomnia, concentration problems, or recurrent intrusive thoughts. A person can have one or several symptoms without meeting criteria for a disorder.

A screening result

The PHQ-9 is a validated measure of depressive symptom severity, and the GAD-7 is a validated anxiety screening and severity measure. Their validation studies show that higher scores are meaningfully related to clinical symptoms and impairment. See Kroenke, Spitzer, and Williams on the PHQ-9 and Spitzer and colleagues on the GAD-7. A screening score estimates symptom burden or flags possible cases; it does not, by itself, establish a diagnosis or explain why the symptoms developed.

A diagnosis

Diagnosis requires the relevant clinical criteria, history, differential assessment, and professional judgment. A diagnosis such as major depressive disorder or generalized anxiety disorder is not inferred from the fact that a partner cheated. The event provides context; the symptom pattern determines whether a particular diagnosis is supported.

When Anxiety or Depressed Mood Deserves Professional Help

You do not need to prove that your distress is severe enough to deserve support. Professional help becomes especially important when symptoms are persistent, worsening, repeatedly overwhelming, or interfering with ordinary functioning. The threshold for seeking help can be lower than the threshold for receiving a formal diagnosis.

Consider contacting a primary care clinician or licensed mental-health professional when one or more of the following are happening:

• Low mood, loss of interest, hopelessness, anxiety, or agitation is present much of the day and is not easing.

• Sleep disruption is severe or persistent enough to impair daytime functioning.

• You are struggling to work, study, parent, eat regularly, care for yourself, or manage essential responsibilities.

• Panic-like episodes, intense physiological arousal, or uncontrollable worry are recurring.

• Alcohol, sedatives, stimulants, or other substances are being used more heavily to cope.

• You are isolating from nearly everyone, losing access to support, or feeling increasingly hopeless.

• Symptoms that existed before the infidelity are returning or intensifying.

• You want help understanding whether what you are experiencing is stress-related distress, depression, an anxiety disorder, a trauma-related condition, or another clinical problem.

• You are functioning outwardly but the internal effort required to do so feels unsustainable.

Do not wait for a diagnostic deadline if you are struggling

NIMH advises seeking professional help when depression symptoms persist or when anxiety begins to interfere with everyday life. Depression guidance and anxiety guidance both emphasize symptom impact and professional assessment. Diagnostic duration criteria help clinicians classify disorders; they are not instructions to endure severe symptoms without support until a clock runs out.

When Help Is Urgent

Urgent or emergency help is appropriate when the concern is immediate safety rather than ordinary coping. That includes suicidal thoughts with intent or a plan, a suicide attempt, self-harm that may become medically dangerous, inability to keep yourself or another person safe, severe behavioral disorganization, or a medical emergency.

In the United States and its territories, call or text 988 or use the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline chat for crisis support. If there is an immediate life-threatening emergency, call 911. Outside the United States, use your local emergency number or local crisis service.

Relationship safety also matters. If the aftermath includes threats, stalking, coercive control, physical violence, sexual violence, or intimidation, prioritize safety and specialized support. A reconciliation framework should never take priority over immediate safety.

What Professional Help May Look Like

The right form of help depends on the problem that actually needs treatment. If the main issue is an individual depressive or anxiety syndrome, individual assessment and evidence-based treatment for those symptoms may be appropriate. If the primary problem is relationship decision-making or repair and both partners freely choose to participate, couples therapy may be considered. These goals can coexist, and one does not substitute for the other.

Psychotherapy can address depression, anxiety, coping, repetitive thinking, shame, sleep-related habits, and functioning. NIMH summarizes evidence-based psychotherapies for common mental disorders and notes that treatment choice should match the person’s needs and clinical situation. NIMH’s psychotherapy overview is a useful general reference.

Couples research is smaller but does not support hopelessness. In a community-based sample of couple therapy, Atkins and colleagues found that couples presenting with infidelity began therapy more distressed than other couples but showed meaningful improvement over treatment and follow-up. That finding does not guarantee reconciliation or relationship survival. It shows that infidelity-related distress is treatable in at least some couples who seek therapy.

Medication can be appropriate for some diagnosed depressive or anxiety disorders, but the decision belongs in a clinical assessment that considers symptom severity, medical history, other medications, substance use, pregnancy status where relevant, and individual preference. Feeling devastated after infidelity does not automatically mean medication is necessary, and needing medication for a clinical disorder does not mean the reaction is somehow less connected to a real life event.

The American Psychological Association’s 2026 clinical overview of infidelity work also emphasizes that therapeutic work can support different outcomes: some couples repair the relationship, some separate, and some individuals focus primarily on their own recovery. Therapy is not a contract to forgive or stay.

What You Can Do While the Situation Is Still Acute

Early coping is less about solving the whole relationship and more about reducing avoidable overload while you regain enough stability to think clearly. The following steps are practical supports, not a guaranteed recovery protocol.

Protect sleep, food, medication routines, and basic functioning

Try to keep ordinary physiological routines as stable as circumstances allow: eat regularly, hydrate, continue prescribed medications as directed, and create a realistic sleep routine. These actions are not treatments for infidelity or substitutes for clinical care. They reduce extra strain while your stress level is already high.

Choose a small number of safe people to tell

Isolation can magnify distress, but telling everyone can create a second problem if you later feel exposed or pressured. Choose people who can listen without forcing a decision, escalating conflict, or turning your private crisis into social entertainment.

Separate necessary information from endless information gathering

Some facts may be necessary for sexual health, financial decisions, parenting, or determining the basic scope of the relationship breach. Repeatedly searching for ever more detail can also become an anxiety-maintaining loop for some people. If information conversations are escalating distress without producing useful clarity, a therapist can help structure what needs to be known and what does not need to be relived repeatedly.

Delay irreversible decisions when you want time—and only when safety permits

Acute shock can make every option feel urgent. If there is no immediate safety, legal, housing, financial, or medical reason to act at once, you can give yourself time before making irreversible relationship decisions. You also have the right to decide quickly if that is genuinely your choice. There is no universal rule that people must reconcile, separate, forgive, disclose publicly, or decide within a fixed period.

Do not use distress as evidence against yourself

Being anxious does not prove that you are weak, dependent, or incapable of leaving. Feeling depressed does not prove that the relationship should be saved. Feeling calm does not prove that you do not care. Emotional intensity is information about your current state, not a verdict on your character or your future decision.

Self-Blame, Shame, and the Search for a Cause

After infidelity, people often search for a single explanation because uncertainty is painful. That search can turn inward: Was I attractive enough? Did I work too much? Was I too trusting? Did my mental health cause this? These questions can become a global judgment of self-worth even when the available evidence does not support that conclusion.

The Shrout and Weigel study linked negative appraisals, including self-blame, with worse mental-health indicators in betrayed college students. That does not mean every self-critical thought causes depression, but it supports taking persistent self-condemnation seriously. The study examined appraisals as part of a broader stress process rather than as proof that the betrayed partner was responsible for the affair.

Relationship problems can exist before infidelity, and those problems can deserve honest attention. Responsibility for relationship problems and responsibility for violating an agreement are separate questions. One partner can contribute to a difficult relationship without causing another person’s decision to cheat.

Anxiety, Intrusive Thoughts, and the Urge to Get Certainty

Many people report repetitive thoughts after discovery: replaying a conversation, reconstructing timelines, comparing themselves with another person, or imagining undisclosed details. These can occur in acute distress and in several clinical conditions. Their presence does not make the experience OCD.

OCD requires a specific pattern of obsessions and/or compulsions and is diagnosed on its own criteria. Reassurance seeking and checking can appear in many contexts, including ordinary crisis responses, anxiety disorders, trauma-related conditions, and relationship conflict. If repetitive thoughts or behaviors are consuming large portions of the day, causing marked distress, or becoming difficult to resist, a mental-health professional can evaluate the pattern without assuming the diagnosis from the topic alone.

Likewise, hypervigilance after betrayal can describe heightened monitoring or alertness without establishing PTSD. Diagnostic labels become useful only when the full criteria fit.

How Long Do Anxiety and Depression Last After Infidelity?

There is no scientifically supported countdown for recovery after infidelity. Symptoms can change rapidly for one person and persist or recur for another. Their course can be shaped by the severity and context of the betrayal, whether new disclosures continue, relationship conflict, social support, prior mental-health history, sleep, financial and family consequences, ongoing contact with the affair partner, safety, and the person’s broader life circumstances.

Longitudinal evidence also argues against simple timelines. Stavrova and colleagues found substantial heterogeneity in personal and relationship well-being trajectories around infidelity events. Those data do not produce a recovery deadline. They show why claims such as “you should be over it in three months” or “healing always takes two years” are not evidence-based rules.

Progress can also be uneven. A difficult week after a calmer month does not erase earlier improvement. At the same time, persistent or worsening symptoms deserve attention rather than being dismissed as something that will automatically disappear with time.

Can a Relationship Decision Fix the Anxiety or Depression?

Staying does not guarantee relief, and leaving does not guarantee immediate relief. Relationship decisions can change the stressors around you, but depression and anxiety symptoms may require their own care. Some people feel substantially better after separation; others experience grief, legal conflict, financial disruption, co-parenting stress, or continued symptoms. Some people who remain together improve; others stay in a chronically destabilizing situation.

A useful mental-health question is therefore: What conditions are helping or worsening my functioning and safety? A useful relationship question is: What do I want to do with this relationship given the facts, my values, the other person’s behavior, and my practical circumstances? The answers can inform each other without becoming the same question.

If coercion, stalking, threats, violence, or abuse are present, safety planning takes priority over ordinary reconciliation work.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is depression after being cheated on normal?

Depressed mood, grief, crying, exhaustion, and reduced interest can occur after infidelity and may be understandable reactions to a major relationship stressor. “Normal” does not mean trivial. If symptoms are persistent, severe, worsening, or impairing daily life, professional assessment is appropriate. Major depressive disorder cannot be diagnosed from the betrayal event alone.

Can infidelity cause major depression?

Research supports an association between affair discovery and major depressive episodes in some samples. Whisman’s probability-sample analysis found a strong association in a selected high-risk subgroup, while Cano and O’Leary found elevated depression in women exposed to humiliating marital events that included infidelity or separation threats. These studies make depression clinically relevant after infidelity, but they do not establish that infidelity alone causes major depression in every case.

Can being cheated on cause an anxiety disorder?

Infidelity can be followed by severe anxiety symptoms, and stressful events can contribute to mental-health problems. An anxiety disorder is diagnosed from the specific symptom pattern, duration, impairment, and differential assessment. Event-related anxiety does not automatically equal GAD, panic disorder, PTSD, or OCD.

Why do I feel anxious even when the affair is over?

The end of the affair does not instantly resolve uncertainty, trust disruption, reminders, practical consequences, or the emotional meaning of what happened. Your anxiety may continue while you process new information and rebuild a sense of predictability. Persistent anxiety that interferes with life is a reason to seek assessment rather than a reason to assume you are failing at recovery.

Is this PTSD?

Possibly having trauma-like symptoms is not the same as having PTSD. The small Roos et al. study found substantial post-traumatic stress symptoms after infidelity in a young unmarried sample, but screening results do not establish a universal diagnosis. PTSD requires its own diagnostic criteria and clinical assessment. “Post-infidelity stress disorder” is not an official DSM or ICD diagnosis.

Are intrusive thoughts after infidelity OCD?

Not by default. Repetitive thoughts can occur in acute distress, depression, anxiety, trauma-related states, grief, relationship crises, and OCD. OCD diagnosis requires the characteristic obsession/compulsion pattern and associated criteria. The content of the thoughts alone is not enough.

Should I take antidepressants after infidelity?

Medication decisions should be based on a clinical assessment of the condition being treated, symptom severity, medical history, preferences, risks, and alternatives—not simply on the fact that infidelity occurred. Antidepressants are evidence-based treatments for some depressive and anxiety disorders, but not everyone with post-infidelity distress needs medication. A primary care clinician or psychiatric prescriber can assess whether medication is appropriate for you.

Does going to couples therapy mean I have to stay?

No. Therapy can be used to clarify what happened, reduce destructive interaction patterns, assess whether repair is possible, support a decision to separate, or coordinate next steps. No evidence-based principle requires reconciliation, forgiveness, or relationship preservation as the outcome.

How long should I wait before seeking therapy?

There is no required waiting period. You can seek support immediately if the distress is difficult to manage, and you should seek prompt help when symptoms are severe, worsening, or impairing. Diagnostic duration criteria should not be interpreted as instructions to postpone care.

What if I am still working and taking care of everyone but feel terrible inside?

Outward functioning does not cancel distress. People can maintain work, caregiving, or social roles while using extraordinary effort to do so. If the internal burden feels unsustainable, professional support can still be appropriate.

What if I have suicidal thoughts after discovering infidelity?

Treat suicidal thoughts as a mental-health safety issue, not as a relationship argument. In the United States and territories, call or text 988 or use the 988 chat. If you are in immediate life-threatening danger, call 911. Elsewhere, contact your local emergency or crisis service. You do not need to resolve the relationship before seeking crisis help.

The Bottom Line

Anxiety and depression after infidelity exist on a spectrum from painful but time-limited emotional reactions to clinically significant symptoms and, for some people, diagnosable mental disorders. Research supports taking the mental-health aftermath seriously, especially depression, while also showing that the evidence base is too limited and heterogeneous to justify universal predictions.

The most accurate approach is individualized: name the symptoms, track their severity and functional impact, protect safety, seek professional assessment when needed, and avoid turning the existence of distress into a diagnosis by itself. You can need help without being “disordered,” and you can have a clinical disorder that deserves treatment without reducing the entire experience to a diagnostic label.

Recovery does not require a predetermined relationship outcome. Mental-health care can help whether you stay, leave, remain undecided, reconcile, or never forgive.

References

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. (n.d.). Get help. https://988lifeline.org/get-help/

American Psychological Association. (2026). How psychologists help patients heal from infidelity. Monitor on Psychology, 57(5). https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/07-08/psychologists-help-heal-infidelity

Atkins, D. C., Marín, R. A., Lo, T. T. Y., Klann, N., & Hahlweg, K. (2010). Outcomes of couples with infidelity in a community-based sample of couple therapy. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(2), 212–216. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018789

Cano, A., & O’Leary, K. D. (2000). Infidelity and separations precipitate major depressive episodes and symptoms of nonspecific depression and anxiety. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 68(5), 774–781. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.68.5.774

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. W. (2001). The PHQ-9: Validity of a brief depression severity measure. Journal of General Internal Medicine, 16(9), 606–613. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1525-1497.2001.016009606.x

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Depression. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). Generalized anxiety disorder: What you need to know. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/generalized-anxiety-disorder-gad

Roos, L. G., O’Connor, V., Canevello, A., & Bennett, J. M. (2019). Post-traumatic stress and psychological health following infidelity in unmarried young adults. Stress and Health, 35(4), 468–479. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2880

Shrout, M. R., & Weigel, D. J. (2018). Infidelity’s aftermath: Appraisals, mental health, and health-compromising behaviors following a partner’s infidelity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 35(8), 1067–1091. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407517704091

Spitzer, R. L., Kroenke, K., Williams, J. B. W., & Löwe, B. (2006). A brief measure for assessing generalized anxiety disorder: The GAD-7. Archives of Internal Medicine, 166(10), 1092–1097. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.166.10.1092

Stavrova, O., Pronk, T., & Denissen, J. (2023). Estranged and unhappy? Examining the dynamics of personal and relationship well-being surrounding infidelity. Psychological Science, 34(2), 143–169. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221116892

Whisman, M. A. (2016). Discovery of a partner affair and major depressive episode in a probability sample of married or cohabiting adults. Family Process, 55(4), 713–723. https://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12185

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