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Unemployment
- ON UNEMPLOYMENT AND POOR PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH
It is one of the major achievements of recent research to have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that unemployment causes, rather than merely results from, poor psychological health [...] studies spanning time, cultures, research groups and research methods converge in their conclusions that unemployment is associated with poor mental health. For many, the most impressive contemporary input has been made by researchers using quantitative psychological methods.Anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction with one's present life, experienced strain, negative self-esteem, hopelessness regarding the future and other negative emotional states ... have each been demonstrated in cross-sectional studies to be higher in unemployed people than in matched groups of employed people.
There is also an emerging consensus that the physical, as well as mental health of unemployed people is also generally lower than that of employed people.
- ON THE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS OF EMPLOYMENT
Marie Jahoda in 1980 said that employment is a social institution with objective consequences that occur for all effected by it, overriding individual differences in feelings, thoughts, motivation and purpose. Some of these, like earning a living, are intended or manifest. Others are unintended or latent.According to Jahoda: " employment makes the following categories of experience inevitable : it imposes a time structure on the waking day; it compels contacts and shared experiences with others outside the nuclear family; it demonstrates that there are goals and purposes which are beyond the scope of an individual but require a collectivity; it imposes status and social identity through the division of labour in modern employment; it enforces activity..."
Crucially, unemployment is said by Jahoda to damage mental health because of the psychological deprivation of these unintended consequences of employment which normally function as psychological supports.
A survey of 3,000 young people over eight years in South Australia asked about their job satisfaction. The study found that those employed youngsters who were dissatisfied with their jobs were indistinguishable in terms of mental health scores from the unemployed youngsters.
- ON UNEMPLOYMENT AND FAMILIES
Back in 1936, German investigations showed that unemployment among German parents brings about a drop in the school marks of two thirds of their children. Where unemployment was very long term, they reported a further decline in school work. More recent Dutch work has also found poorer school performance in children with unemployed fathers.McLoyd in 1989 concluded, after an extensive literature review, that children with unemployed fathers are at risk of `socio-emotional problems, deviant behaviour, and reduced aspirations and expectations. The child may also model the somatic complaints of the father...'. McLoyd cites specific evidence regarding: mental health problems, withdrawal from peers, depression, loneliness, emotional sensitivity, distrustfulness, decreased sociability and low self-esteem.
Research by McKee and Bell in 1986 points to the difficulties spouses, generally female partners of unemployed men, face in trying to manage on reduced income, to cope with the spouses' intrusive presence in the household, to support distressed partners and deal with intra-family conflict.
- ON MENTAL HEALTH AND RE-EMPLOYMENT
Some of the effects of unemployment may persist into the period of re-employment. Kaufman in 1982 found that one fifth of his sample of re-employed professionals were under-employed i.e. had had to accept jobs which were inferior in terms of salary, type of work and use of skills. Only 47% reported their lives had returned to normal following re-employment. Further research has shown that re-employment is likely to be at a lower level and the re-employed people more vulnerable to future redundancy due to last in, first out practices.The researcher Fineman in 1987 followed up a previously unemployed sample of people and found those re-employed in jobs which they felt were inadequate were experiencing more stress, and even poorer self-esteem, than they had during their period of unemployment. Half of Fineman's re-employed informants had what he described as `legacy' effects, whatever the quality of the new job. This legacy took of feeling there was a lasting blemish or stigma on their work record, of continuing doubts about their abilities, of personal failure. Organisationally they were prepared to give less of themselves to their new jobs.
- ON MENTAL HEALTH AND OCCUPATIONAL STRESS
There is a massive literature on occupational stress, increasingly referred to as strain. A traditional way of coping with such strain has been to change jobs. However, in recessional labour market conditions, people are increasingly likely to become trapped in psychologically distressing jobs.A survey of 3,000 young people over eight years in South Australia asked about their job satisfaction. The study found that those employed youngsters who were dissatisfied with their jobs were indistinguishable in terms of mental health scores from the unemployed youngsters.
- ON MENTAL HEALTH AND WORK SCHEMES
Research into Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP) participation in 1985 found that YOP trainees were not, on average, significantly less depressed than members of an unemployed comparison group, and were more depressed than an employed group. Interviews suggested that the trainees perceived YOP as low status (`cheap labour', `not a proper job'), as providing inadequate training, as lacking in meaningful purpose, as actually hindering the search for a `proper' job and as unlikely to lead to adequate, secure employment.Davies in 1993 investigated the Community Programme, reporting generally positive participant evaluation of the work but generally negative perception of the context of the scheme and its temporary nature with frequently experienced anxieties about the future. The psychological well-being of Community Programme participants was on a par with that of comparable employed people but their felt control was as low as comparable unemployed people.
- ON CAREERS OF DISADVANTAGE
Many people have careers of labour market disadvantage consisting of moving from school or insecure, psychologically dissatisfying, stressful jobs within the secondary labour market via training schemes into further unemployment or other insecure employment or sickness and so on in a cycle of adverse labour market experience.Many people are preoccupied with the problems of long-term unemployment. My suspicion is that careers of labour market disadvantage, repeated unemployment, unsatisfactory employment and scheme attendance, is not only far more common than long term unemployment but is at least as - possibly more - psychologically corrosive.
- ON RECESSION AND MENTAL HEALTH
Mass unemployment effects many more people than those so far discussed : trade union influence is reduced, wages are depressed for those in jobs (minimum wages and wages councils in the UK have recently become things of the past), improvements to the working environment regarding health and safety and the `humanisation of work' are slowed down or put into reverse, employment as rehabilitation after physical injury, illness, mental breakdown and prison becomes decreasingly available and minorities become increasingly vulnerable to exclusion from the labour market with consequent further marginalisation and impoverishment. All these factors impinge on mental health via the labour market. - ON MENTAL HEALTH AND BEING ON WELFARE
The very process of claiming is reported to be distressing. Kay in 1985 pointed at unacceptably poor physical conditions, perceived invasion of privacy, sense of being passively processed, of humiliation and degradation.State financial support has frequently been reported as experienced as a stigmatised, illegitimate, source of income in contrast with earned income. There is even some evidence that income maintenance may be stressful in its own right. Thoits and Hannan in 1979 reported a small but reliable increase in divorce rate, geographical mobility and psychological distress in income maintained participants.
- ON PSYCHOLOGISTS AND UNEMPLOYMENT
Psychologists and others must engage with the mental health costs of psychological and material deprivation which is part and parcel for many in their labour market careers. We need a research treatment of deprivation which is not merely `academic'. We must never lose sight of the fact that we are concerned not merely with a matter of semantics but with real misery and risk of mental health costs for very many millions of people.Source "Benefit agency? Labour market disadvantage, deprivation and mental health" The C.S.Myers Lecture 1994 by David Fryer published in The Psychologist (June 1995)
The Evening Standard 25 August 1995 "Intervention programmes `worsen misery'" by Shani Naylor (report on Massey Lecture)
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A Mental Health issue
from The Jobs Letter No.24/ 9 September 1995
Dr David Fryer, visiting psychologist from Stirling University in Scotland, has studied the psychological effects of unemployment for 14 years. He told an audience at Massey University last month that research into the effects of unemployment over the last 60yrs has produced `worryingly consistent findings'. His studies showed that up to 40% of unemployed people suffered psychological distress.
Dr Fryer says that many official intervention programmes aimed at helping unemployed people only increased the mental health costs of unemployment. He says that Social Policy in Britain "couldn't be designed much more effectively to exaggerate the risk of mental health problems".
Dr Fryer gave the 1994 C.S.Myers lecture at the British Psychological Society's annual conference in Brighton. We here give an essential summary of this lecture on Dr Fryer's research into unemployment as a mental health issue.
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