More than 300 million people worldwide suffer from depression, and promoting mental health is now an explicit target for Sustainable Development Goals. We examine the scope of women’s empowerment in improving mental health. Exploiting variation from a legal reform intended to increase women’s inheritance rights in India, we find that women exposed to the reform exhibit significantly better markers of mental health in later life. Overall, their mental health index improved by 0.1 sigma to 0.2 sigma, and their life satisfaction index improved by 0.12 sigma. We also uncover spillover effects of similar magnitudes on the husbands of treated women. No such effects are observed for individuals from the same state-cohort groups belonging to religious communities to which the reform did not apply. We demonstrate improvements in multiple socio-economic indicators as mechanisms for the downstream effects on mental health - treated households report 5 percentage points higher rates of land ownership, and treated women have a 0.1 sigma higher autonomy index. The results emphasize the significance of economic policies in enhancing mental well-being.