A person’s mental health can be just as negatively affected by a job with poor psychosocial quality as it is with unemployment.

The finding came from a team of experts from Australia and the UK and was published in Psychological Medicine. This research is significant because employment is typically linked to more health benefits than unemployment.

Prior studies have shown that having a job is linked to lower levels of psychiatric morbidity, or mental illness, than not having a job and that a person’s mental health improves if they switch from unemployment to employment.

However, previous research has also indicated that the psychosocial characteristics of work (parts of the job that require social and psychological behavior) have an impact on health.

In a report by the same authors, published last year in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, they demonstrated that when a person starts working in a high quality job, his/her psychological distress lowers. They also found that people experience elevated levels of distress when when they switch from unemployment to the poorest psychosocial quality jobs. This study, however, did not examine the experience of clinical mental disorders.

For the current study, the researchers analyzed data from the English Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey which examined the prevalence of CMDs (common mental disorders). The 2603 people who filled out the survey were aged between 21 and 54 years and were either employed or unemployed and searching for a job.

The scientists evaluated the quality of work by the number of unfavorable psychosocial work conditions reported:

  • high demands
  • low control
  • low job esteem
  • insecurity

According to the results, those who were unemployed and those who were in the poorest quality jobs showed no difference in the rates of CMD.

The unemployment group and the group with the poorest quality jobs had a higher chance of developing a CMD than those working in high quality jobs. This remained true even after adjusting for demographic and socioeconomic factors.

Although most people believe that employment improves mental health and well-being, if a job has poor psychosocial quality, it does not improve mental health any better than unemployment does.

Associate Professor Butterworth, leading author, said, “Policy efforts to improve community mental health should consider psychosocial job quality in conjunction with efforts to increase employment rates.”

Butterworth concluded:

“The current results suggest that good quality work is associated with lower rates of psychiatric disorders. This provides policy makers, coordinators of workplace programs, and employers with a potential tool or leverage point for improving mental health in the community. The improvement of psychosocial work conditions, such as reducing job demands, and increasing job control, security, and esteem can flow on to improvements in employee’s mental health and reduce the burden of illness on public health systems.”

Written by Sarah Glynn