TITLE:
Unemployment as a Risk Factor for Mental Illness: Combining Social and Psychiatric Literature
AUTHORS:
Shuo Zhang, Vishal Bhavsar
KEYWORDS:
Unemployment; Mental Illness; Schizophrenia; Depression; Etiology
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Applied Sociology,
Vol.3 No.2,
June
4,
2013
ABSTRACT: Unemployment has been shown to have wide
ranging effects on physical and mental health. This review looks to clarify the
relationship between unemployment and mental illness specifically, in terms of
establishing causality, effect size and moderating factors. The current
rational for research combines an etiological approach and interest in the
social causation of disease with past work from a social psychological
perspective. For this review, PsychInfo, Medline and Embase databases were
searched between the years of 1970 and 2011, for prospective studies that
include unemployment and mental illness terms. 10 studies were found which
matched the inclusion criteria. Studies were included if they studied the long
term unemployed, defined the age and gender of their study population, defined
their outcome measurements in medical terms, and followed a population
prospectively over time. Overall unemployment did precede mental illness;
however the exact effect size is unclear. A quantitative meta-analysis was not
conducted due to the variability in study design. The discussion tries to point
to methodological and theoretical limitations that affect investigations into
unemployment and mental illness. It concludes that the work has so far been
skewed by individual biases, and that there needs to be wider collaboration
between the social sciences and psychiatry.