How depression can easily follow redundancy

Justin Thomas says that economic depression need not lead to the psychological kind

Unemployment can contribute to depression. Getty Images/Caiaimage

I remember my first job. It was selling food at a concert venue in Liverpool. The job was easy; there were only three things on the menu: pie, chips or pie and chips. At the end of the night I received my first ever pay packet, literally, a small brown envelope containing cash. When I arrived home that night I eagerly ripped open the brown packet and along with my £15 (Dh67) there was also a scruffy handwritten note that read: “Justin you’ve been sacked.” No explanation. Not even a thank you for your services.

This was a long time ago and thankfully the only time I ever lost a job, but I still recall it vividly. It wasn’t a job I loved, or a job I had committed years to, but being made unemployed still hurt. Consider then how much more painful this experience must be for those who do love their jobs and those who have committed decades of life to their organisations.

Being fired, sacked, canned, axed, laid off or made redundant are all major predictors of mental health problems. There is even a very clear link between job loss and suicide. In the United States during the Reagan years, redundancies spiked and so did suicides.

A study published in Sociological Focus estimated that the Reagan-era rise in unemployment was associated with at least an additional 929 suicides.

The economic crisis of 2008 reawakened an interest in this relationship between unemployment and suicide. One study found that those regions of the United Kingdom experiencing the highest rises in unemployment after 2008, also experienced the greatest increases in suicide. A broader multinational study, reported in the Lancet Psychiatry in 2016, looked at the rates of suicide between 2000 and 2011 across 63 countries, including Kuwait, which was the only Gulf state included. Despite regional differences in suicide rates, this study identified a clear global trend: rises in unemployment were associated with increases in suicide. This was particularly the case among working age men and in places where unemployment was relatively low to begin with. When people lose jobs, people lose loved ones.

Another study, reported in the Journal of Affective Disorders in 2015, looked at the risk profile of those completing recession-related suicide in England in 2010 and 2011. The major characteristics identified were indebtedness, having financial dependants and having had little or no previous contact with mental health services. This last point is particularly significant as mental health services are typically charged with preventing suicides.

Job losses are just the sharp edge of the axe. The blunt side of economic recession includes the related issues of job insecurity, pay cuts and being asked to do more in order to plug the gaps left by departed colleagues. Such workplace stress factors can follow some employees home, giving rise to relationship problems and perhaps eroding the very foundation of their social support system. Unsurprisingly this broader array of recession-related issues also affects mental health.

Knowing what we know, it makes sense for us to target special preventive interventions at those at heightened risk during economic recession.

Even during the good times such a preventative focus can foster resilience, flexibility and a consolingly realistic outlook – always useful tools. In short, compassionate workplace leadership and well designed workplace well-­being programmes can go some way to enable us help each other thrive, even through times of adversity.

After being dismissed from the fast food industry, I later went on to work in mental health care. I led a team within the UK’s National Health Service responsible for suicide prevention (a job I didn’t lose). We had a motto: “If it’s predictable, it’s preventable”. Economic depression need not lead to psychological depression, and the loss of livelihood should never result in the loss of life.

Dr Justin Thomas is an associate professor at Zayed University

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas