Long-Term Unemployment Can Tax Mental Health

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeEven in resilient people, six months' unemployment has psychological impact, research shows

October 19, 2011

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 19 (HealthDay News) -- Americans who were jobless for longer than 25 weeks in the past year were three times more likely than those who were continuously employed to suffer mental health issues for the first time, a new study finds.

Being jobless also has a greater psychological impact on people with more than a high school education than on those with less education, the researchers found.

The study involved people who had never had clinically defined emotional health issues in their life or who had their first bout of problems in the most recent year.

"In looking at this group of resilient individuals, we compared the psychological health of those who were fully employed with those who were exposed to short-term unemployment or less than 25 weeks of involuntary joblessness, and with people who were exposed to long-term unemployment over the past year," Arthur Goldsmith, an economics professor at Washington and Lee University, said in a university news release.

The findings were scheduled for presentation Wednesday at a Congressional briefing on the emotional impact of unemployment sponsored by the American Psychological Association.

"The reason we focus on this group is that if you're 55 years old, and you've never had a bout of poor emotional well-being that would be described clinically in that way, and have your first bout in the past year when you are exposed to unemployment, it's very unlikely that your poor mental health led to the unemployment rather than your unemployment leading to the poor mental health. Thus, we are able to address the issue of causality that has plagued prior studies of the link between unemployment and mental health," Goldsmith explained.

He and his colleagues found that the risk of first-time mental health issues was about the same for people who were fully employed and those who experienced short-term unemployment.

"On the other hand, we found that people exposed to long-term unemployment were three times as likely as employed people over the past year to be exposed to their first bout of psychological distress in a clinically defined way," Goldsmith said.

Depression and general anxiety are the two primary causes of poor mental health related to long-term unemployment, the study found.

"When people are exposed to long-term unemployment, they obviously feel that they've lost control of their capacity to earn a living and take care of their families," Goldsmith said. "They worry about their futures."

The study also found that the psychological impact of unemployment tends to be greater among people in minority groups and those with higher levels of education.

For a person in a minority group, unemployment likely heightens their concerns about their ability to do well due to a history of job discrimination because of race and ethnicity.

"People with a lot of education tend to believe that they have control of events in their lives and are self-blamers. That is really damaging to emotional well-being," Goldsmith explained.

The research should be considered preliminary because it has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

More information
The Canadian Mental Health Association offers tips for coping with unemployment.
Copyright © 2011 HealthDay. All rights reserved.


Taken from USNews.com, Health News; source article is below:
Long-Term Unemployment Can Tax Mental Health

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Think, before it's too late

Image via Wikipedia

John Bittleston

succeed@mediacorp.com.sg

IF WE want to prevent the imminent end of the human species as we know it, we need all the creative thought we can muster.

We have less than 20 years to manage technology and keep our ability to decide our future. The alternative is a controlled species of semi-sentient automatons responding to a central decision-making organisation run, perhaps, by bankers.

Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to measure how happy we are. The basic ingredient of happiness - selflessness - is hard to grasp because it has to do with motive as well as action. We do not understand our own motives and are usually wrong about other people's, because everything we do is done for a mixture of selfless and selfish reasons.

That is what the human race has at stake. Our world is interesting and challenging because of its imperfections, not in spite of them. Eradicating them is seen as the road to Valhalla. The journey provides opportunity for character-building, for fun and as a test of our capabilities. The material destination is within sight. The emotional destination has yet to be identified. Now is the time to do that by concerted creative thought and effort.

What do we need to know? What must we do?

Understanding our personalities, what makes us aspire to create "beyond the single need" and how we work should now be top of the agenda, ahead of technological development, more important than health, wealth, longevity and material comfort.

The mind has been neglected in our researches. If 10 per cent of the effort to understand, explain and promote the soul had been devoted to fathoming the mind, we would have been an infinitely more balanced world than we are. If the amount spent on missile shields was matched by that on expanding the mind, the need for missile shields would disappear.

Even setting up the plan for such research requires creative thought beyond what we have achieved so far. We need to put thinking back on the pedestal it occupied in ancient Greece. Many have tried to do this over the centuries. Some have had modest success, but the conclusion has almost always ended up as a reckoning to be reached beyond death rather than one to be achieved on earth.

When we become immortal - very soon - we shall need to address "heavens below" as well as "heavens above".

Brain and mind research must merge so that we discover how developing the one can be matched with expansion of the other. Unleashing the abilities of the mind, which even today are barely understood, will allow man to put technology and material matters in perspective and give us control of our destinies in ways that we have not yet begun to achieve. Singapore is in a unique position to spearhead this.

The arts let us glimpse the potential of our thoughts and feelings, yet we neglect them in favour of war weapons. The emotional intelligence (EI) of the young is more precious to humanity than is the trick of programming stock market transactions, yet there is no EI programme in Business Administration or Economics.

Desire to communicate with and influence millions of people is less important than the yearning to attend to a fellow creature and, in return, receive the same attention from that person.

An uncontrolled race for wealth and technology deprives people of their right to freedom of choice, to self-understanding and to the balanced lifestyle of which we hear so much and for which so little is being done.

Can we pause to put thought before action, mind before matter and understanding before it is too late?

John Bittleston mentors people in business, career and their personal lives at www.TerrificMentors.com

From TODAY, Business – Monday, 28-Sep-2009

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Don’t fear the ‘ultimate fear’

 

TAKING CHARGE

John Bittleston, succeed@mediacorp.com.sg

WHAT is most important in your life: Health, love, money, security, happiness? All are important, but before you can acquire any of these, you must have freedom from fear.

Fear of rejection, of failure, of loss, of self-dislike — they all drive us. Parenting, education, religion and management involve elements of fear. Too much fear.

The ultimate fear is of fear itself, telling us that we are not happy with who we are and that we are unprepared for who or what we may become. Ultimate fear is increasing because of the threats to our way of life. What can we do about it?

People handle “ultimate fear” by ignoring it or pretending they know the answer when they do not. Both ostriches are acceptable, but neither is very satisfactory. Like unpaid debts, they postpone the time when we must face up to them. Fear does not go away; it multiplies until we deal with it.

To face fear successfully, we must take action. Uncertainty, the main cause of fear, is part of our lives. We cannot, or do not, forecast very much. Our analysis of the consequences of what we do is inadequate. Uncertainty exerts pressure on us; we need to deal with that pressure with grace. In fact, the definition of courage is “grace under pressure”.

To realise that there is no guaranteed security is itself paradoxically reassuring. We learn to cope with what comes our way, get the right help and free ourselves from the dark unknown.

Here are five ways to deal with fear. Professionals can help, too, and you may occasionally need to call on them. Try the following first.

1. Write down what currently worries you. Be honest. Do not pretend that one thing worries you when it is quite another.

2. Against each of your worries, write the very best and the very worst possible outcomes. Be sensible; exaggerated extremes do not help solve the problem. This is the real world, not a paralysing nightmare.

3. For each worry, write what you think will be the outcome. Your forecast will not necessarily come true, but nobody else is going to forecast better.

If your forecasts are all gloomy, predicting that the worst will happen with each worry, you have a problem. It may be a little one, cured by a couple of days on Valium tablets — only your doctor can tell you that.

On the other hand, you may have clinical depression. This is not a sin or a judgment; it is a medical condition and requires professional treatment. About one in every 250 Mentees who comes to me needs therapy, generally only for a very short time.

4. If you do not need professional treatment, consider the most important of the worries, and write down what you could do to reduce the problem. Maybe a lower targeted wage, perhaps a word of apology or even a friendly chat with the boss or spouse could make the outcome a little more acceptable.

The point is not whether that will solve the problem; the sort of problems you are likely to be dealing with are not that easily solved. The point is that taking any helpful action, however small, will reduce the worry somewhat.

5. Show you care for someone a little more than usual. When all is said and done, our lives are not much more than loving and being loved. We all know that, but we sometimes forget it. The best action we can take to distract ourselves from worry is to care for someone else.

It is useful for them, too.

John Bittleston mentors people in business, career and their personal lives at www.TerrificMentors.com.

From TODAY, Succeed – Monday, 04-May-2009

 

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