Your Employment Status Can Affect Your Mental Health in a Profound Way
A businessman walks along Wall Street in front of the New York Stock Exchange | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
If there’s been one topic of discussion that simply won’t recede over the past several years, it’s jobs. Unemployment rates, wage stagnation, and jobs, jobs, jobs — following the Great Recession, these have been the top issues pushed by politicians and the media. There’s good reason for that, too; the economy, though much improved, is still rife with problems. Problems that not only take a toll on the average American’s ability to invest and save for the future, but also on their mental health.
It’s that mental health aspect that we often overlook, however. Obviously, losing your job will have a huge impact on your finances. You’ll have to take stock of your resources and plan accordingly. But losing your job, or simply having a hard time finding a new one, can be much more taxing than we realize. It shakes your confidence and makes you second-guess yourself. After an extended period of time, it can really gnaw at you — and even lead to depression or anxiety issues.
In short, your employment status (or lack thereof) can be destructive to your mental health, not just your personal finances. A new study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, all but confirms it. And it’s something that we should take into consideration as our economy continues to evolve.
It’s all about employment status
A ‘now hiring’ sign is posted outside of a store, advertising opportunities for employment | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The study, conducted by Lindsay Richards and Marii Paskov, both researchers at the U.K.’s University of Oxford, examined the impact of social class and psychological well-being in the United Kingdom. Though many of us tend to think, particularly in an age of drastic economic inequality, that our given social class can have a mammoth impact on our mental health and well-being, Richards and Paskov conclude that it has more to do with whether we have a job than if that job makes us rich.
By looking at “well-being gradients” for given social or working classes (managerial, semi-skilled, unskilled, etc.), the researchers found that employment status is often an overlooked part of the equation. Simply having a job is much more important to our psychological well-being and mental health than we’ve previously realized. Well-being and social class have typically been explained through a number of traditional channels, and this new research basically says that there is another that’s been ignored.
“We noticed that employment status is forgotten in many studies of well-being gradients,” the authors write, in a follow-up piece published by The Conversation. “Yet employment status is associated with far larger differences in well-being than class.”
Mental health and status
Feeling alone | iStock.com
At the root of the research is the idea that the more successful and financially secure you are, the happier you’ll be. Happiness, in this case, is measured by psychological well-being. Though there are a lot of twists and tangles that make looking into these types of things difficult (people with psychological issues will find it harder to climb the corporate ladder, for example), this newest study shows that our social status or class may not be as important, psychologically, as we thought.
“Does this mean that class does not matter? Have sociologists been barking up the wrong tree all these years by talking about social class? We shouldn’t be too hasty,” the authors write. “We have seen that social class is a key factor in determining access to the labour market, which has clear implications for psychological health. But the real culprit, as we’ve demonstrated, is employment status.”
No comments:
Post a Comment