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The most powerful mental-health remedy for joblessness is getting back to work.
Losing a job hurts. Everyone knows this. A new paper in Social Science & Medicine offers one of the clearest pictures yet of what actually happens to people’s mental health before and after a layoff. The findings are both intuitive and surprising.
The paper, by Olivier Bargain, Nicolas Hérault and Daniel Nettle, uses data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. The researchers followed more than 14,000 people across 22 years and tracked over 4,200 job losses. Unlike many previous studies, this data set allowed the researchers to examine mental health quarter by quarter around the time people were let go. Relying on yearly snapshots can blur together several distinct experiences: the dread of losing a job, the layoff itself, the months of unemployment that follow and the search for a new job. This paper separates these stages more precisely.
The first major finding is that people’s mental health begins declining well before they actually lose their jobs. This might seem obvious. If you think you’re about to be fired, of course you’ll feel stressed. But the paper challenges this interpretation.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.