The pandemic has brought to the fore the links between unemployment and mental health. With unemployment rising around the world, new research looking at the long-term effects is especially timely. Liam Wright and colleagues from UCLA’s Department of Epidemiology and Public Health describe new research that could spur efforts to target vulnerable groups and use resources efficiently.
We’ve known for some time that unemployment has a detrimental effect on mental health. We also know that these effects can last for many years. A large body of research tells us that those who stopped working when they were young are more likely to suffer from poor health, depression and anxiety even decades later.
It is particularly useful to examine these effects from the perspective of youth unemployment, for two main reasons. First, unemployment rates are higher for those under 25 and recessions have a disproportionate effect on them. Second, unemployment at this formative stage in life may have a greater impact than unemployment later on: it can affect the way young people see themselves and can set off “risk chains”.
Negative experiences during youth can have a measurable effect on our responses to stress, and this can have a lifelong impact on our physical and mental health.
But so far we don’t know much about the reasons behind these links, or whether these effects are experienced differently by different groups of people. By learning more about these things, we should be able to direct resources more effectively to those who are likely to need additional help.
We decided to look at whether unemployment had a stronger association with later mental health for some individuals than for others using a statistical technique called quantitative regression. We also looked at whether the association was stronger for those with longer periods of unemployment, and was greater in men or women, and whether later employment success (which is thought to explain the association) was associated with relatively better mental health.
Psychological health
We used data from Next Steps, previously the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which tracked a cohort of English school children aged 13-14 years in 2003-4. The group was followed until the age of 25 — by that point, there were 7,700 in our sample.
The participants’ mental health was measured at age 25 using the General Health Questionnaire or GHQ-12, a screening tool that can pick up mood and anxiety disorders and that scores them on a 36-point seriousness scale — with 36 being the most severe. We also took into account whether or not the respondents had a disability, their mental health during adolescence, as well as how they viewed their general physical health.
We were able to compare these health scores with the employment status of young people, focusing on those who had been unemployed for six months or more between the ages of 18 and 20 – this occurred between 2008 and 2010 and coincided with the global financial crisis that rose after it. Youth unemployment significantly.
We considered a range of other factors such as gender, ethnicity, neighborhood deprivation, educational attainment at age 25, and risk-taking behaviors such as drug and alcohol use, smoking, and antisocial behaviour.
The results supported our main hypothesis that the association between youth unemployment and later mental health was driven by a relatively small proportion of previously unemployed individuals with very poor levels of mental health. Our model suggested that among a group of hypothetical individuals with average characteristics, more than 30 percent of those who remained unemployed for more than six months would have GHQ scores over 15 on the 36-point GHQ scale; 10 percentage points more than those who did not.
These effects could be seen even among those hired at age 25, and there was some evidence that the association was greater for men than for women.
Who is at risk?
Our findings support and expand our existing knowledge, and also raise questions: Who are the individuals most at risk? We know that men are more vulnerable in this regard than women, although this may partly be because they are more likely to be looking for work than looking after children, for example. But do men suffer more economically, compared to mental health?
We might also look at whether certain personality traits can help or hinder the well-being of those who find themselves unemployed as young adults. For example, does it help to feel that one is in control of one’s own destiny, rather than taking a more fatalistic approach?
We may also look at the mechanisms by which scarring occurs. Can youth unemployment affect people’s neurobehavioral development? Or should we focus more on the ways in which an early bout of unemployment can cause problems later in the labor market?
Answers to these questions can help us identify vulnerable groups more precisely, and point to policy solutions that can reduce the effects of scarring in the future.
Heterogeneity in the association between youth unemployment and mental health in later life: a quantitative regression analysis of longitudinal data from English schoolchildren.And is search by Liam Wright, Jenny Head and Stephen Givraj are from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, and it is published in BMJ Open (http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2020-047997).
