Unemployment And Mental Health

The U.S. economy shed over 10 million jobs from 2007 to 2009 and gross domestic product (GDP) dropped by more than 5 percent — the largest decline since World War II. The unemployment rate soared from 5 percent to well over 9 percent, leading this period to be dubbed the Great Recession. At the height of the Great Recession the average bout of unemployment lasted half a year and some estimates suggest that half of the unemployed were out of work for more than two years. This was an economically devastating epoch in our nation’s history.

Psychologists (Eisenberg and Lazarsfield 1938) and sociologists (Jahoda et al. 1933) have argued as far back as the Great Depression that unemployment damages emotional health and undermines the social fabric of society. Psychologists draw a conceptual connection between involuntary joblessness and mental health in numerous ways such as: incomplete...