This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Lost Connections" by Johann Hari. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What causes work-related depression? How can the problem be fixed?
Work-related depression happens when people are stuck with a job where they feel underappreciated and miserable. It can be fixed by providing employees with fair wages, greater control, reasonable hours, and job security.
Read on to learn more about work-related depression.
The Impact of Work-Related Depression
For many people, being miserable at work leads to work-related depression. Most people sleepwalk through their workday or actively dread going to work, often because they feel they have little control over their responsibilities and thus disengage from their work. In 2011 and 2012, a Gallup poll surveyed millions of people all over the world. Only 13% said they are “enthusiastic about and committed to” their work. The rest were “not engaged” (63%) or “actively disengaged” (24%). At the same time, work hours are expanding—the “nine to five” is now more of a “seven to seven”—which means that many people spend more time working than doing things they actually enjoy.
It might seem obvious that spending most of your life in a job where you have little control and aren’t actively engaged could lead to work-related depression, but scientists resisted that idea for many years. The tide began to change after a landmark study of British civil servants showed that the higher your status at work, the lower your risk of heart attacks and depression.
This finding contradicted the popular assumption that people at the top of the ladder would have more health problems because they made more important decisions and therefore had more stress. In fact, a second study of the British civil service showed that people who have more control over their work are far less likely to suffer from work-related depression than people who have less control, even when they work in the same office and have the same salary. In other words, the degree of control you have over your job is a better predictor of depression than where you work, how much status you have, or even how much money you make.
This lack of control affects people even after they clock out. People who feel they have a sense of control over their work tend to feel more fulfilled at the end of a workday, so they have the energy to spend time with friends and family. On the other hand, people who have very little control over their work lives tend to be so drained by the end of a workday that they have no energy to invest in their relationships. Over time, that lack of investment creates disconnections with other people that only worsen depression.
Another control-related factor that determines how much work contributes to depression is the balance between effort and reward. In some jobs, the harder you work, the more money and status you gain; in others, your performance and dedication don’t matter, and the only time anyone even notices your work is if you do something wrong. If your efforts have a meaningful impact on your rewards, as in the former case, you have some degree of control over how rewarding your work is, and a lower risk of developing work-related depression; but if your efforts go unnoticed and you have no control over your rewards, your risk for depression increases.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Lost Connections summary :
- The psychological and social factors that contribute to mental illness
- The history of antidepressants and the science behind them
- Why Amish people hardly ever get depressed
