With the COVID-19 crisis creating economic upheaval unlike any seen since the Great Depression, public health officials and economists expect Americans will face continued job uncertainty and stress, and psychological interventions will be essential for helping people cope.
The mental health impacts of today’s job losses are likely to be significant, given a large body of research showing that unemployment is linked to anxiety, depression and loss of life satisfaction, among other negative outcomes. Similarly, underemployment and job instability—two additional results of the coronavirus pandemic—create distress for those who aren’t counted in the unemployment numbers.
Many of these people will need psychological support. In fact, research suggests that a mental-health-informed approach is not just helpful, it’s required: Job search programs that don’t involve nurturing people’s motivational and cognitive resources simply aren’t as effective as those that do. Psychologists can also inform policymakers on the physical and mental health consequences of unemployment.
“Losing a job and being unemployed for a long period of time is a psychological trauma and a financial trauma, and the two are closely intertwined,” says Carl Van Horn, PhD, a professor of public policy and an expert on workforce and unemployment policy at Rutgers University. Mental health support can be lifesaving, he says. While psychologists can’t solve the economic problem, “they can certainly help people cope and manage it.”
Risks to mental health
Research on unemployment shows that losing one’s job is detrimental to mental health—and often physical health—even without serious financial strain. “Work provides us time structure, it provides us identity, it provides us purpose and it also provides us social interactions with others,” says Connie Wanberg, PhD, an industrial and organizational psychologist at the University of Minnesota. “When you lose all that, it creates a lot of difficulties for people.”
Those at the most risk for mental health challenges after job loss are those for whom unemployment is an immediate threat to survival. People with fewer financial resources and those who perceive more financial strain from unemployment are less satisfied with their lives, according to a meta-analysis led by Frances McKee-Ryan, PhD, a professor of management at the University of Nevada, Reno (Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 90, No. 1, 2005).
“The bottom line is people need to eat. They need to have shelter. They need to have health care,” says David Blustein, PhD, a professor of counseling, developmental and educational psychology at Boston College.
But job loss also has negative effects across the board. An influential meta-analysis by Karsten Paul, PhD, and Klaus Moser, PhD, both in the department of organizational and social psychology at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany, found that across 237 cross-sectional and 87 longitudinal studies, unemployed people were more distressed; less satisfied with their lives, marriages and families; and more likely to report psychological problems than the employed (Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 74, No. 3, 2009).
The analysis found that the effect of unemployment is likely causal: In longitudinal studies, unemployed people see mental health gains when they secure new jobs. Studies on factory closures, in which everyone loses their jobs at the same time, also show that nearly all laid-off workers experience subsequent mental health declines—evidence that job loss is damaging to mental health, rather than people with poorer mental health being more likely to experience unemployment. The longer the stretch of unemployment, the worse people fare, with people out of work for six months or more experiencing the worst mental health outcomes. Countries with high wealth inequality and weak unemployment protections had worse mental health outcomes among the unemployed in Paul and Moser’s meta-analysis, a factor that puts Americans at risk. As measured by the Gini coefficient, an economic measure of inequality, the United States has the highest income inequality of any G-7 country and its unemployment protections are relatively weak. Many laid-off workers lose their job-based health insurance and have access to less-generous unemployment benefits than workers in other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries.
Unfortunately for those who have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis, there seems to be little comfort in solidarity. Wanberg, McKee-Ryan and colleagues found no evidence that losing one’s job during an employment crisis had fewer mental health ramifications. Losing one’s job due to a massive societal shock is a two-sided coin, Wanberg says. “Right now, there is so much unemployment that there is a little more camaraderie or support. But at the same time, mental health is more impacted because people don’t have an easy segue to find new jobs.”
A qualitative study by Blustein and his colleagues found further evidence of workers’ complex feelings when they lose their jobs. People who blamed their job loss on their own failings felt worse about themselves but remained optimistic about learning new skills and finding a new, better job. Those who saw the fingerprints of systemic issues, such as discrimination or macroeconomic forces, in their job loss viewed themselves less negatively but also felt more frustrated about their ability to change their circumstances (Journal of Vocational Behavior, Vol. 82, No. 3, 2013).
In both therapy settings and advocacy work, psychologists can help destigmatize unemployment and discourage self-blame. A study of white-collar workers in the United States and Tel Aviv found that unemployed professionals in the United States tended to blame themselves for losing their jobs, while those in Israel blamed the broader system (Sharone, O., Social Forces, Vol. 91, No. 4, 2013).
A tendency toward less generous self-evaluations after unemployment is linked to worse mental health. Psychologists are also studying the mental health effects of underemployment. Evidence so far suggests that job insecurity and instability promote poor mental health, too, particularly if a person’s wages are low or if they are forced into temporary positions, says Blake Allan, PhD, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Houston. New research on long-term job insecurity using data collected in Australia finds that when insecurity persists for four years or longer, people become less emotionally stable, less agreeable and less conscientious (Journal of Applied Psychology, online first publication, 2020). These personality traits are important for both work performance and well-being, says Chia-Huei Wu, PhD, the chair in organizational psychology at Leeds University Business School in England, who co-authored the research.
“We argue that chronic job insecurity can lead to such impacts on personality change because it reinforces a negative self-reinforcing loop over time,” Wu says. For example, he says, the anxiety related to job insecurity can lead people to pay more attention to the uncertain aspects of their job and life, which in turn often distracts them from tasks that could help reduce job insecurity, so the anxiety continues.
Just how well a person copes with job loss may be determined by protective factors in their lives. McKee-Ryan, Wanberg and colleagues found in their 2005 review that unemployed workers who had social support, the ability to maintain a daily routine, who viewed work as less central to their identities and who had high hopes for reemployment responded better to job loss. Reframing job loss also appears to benefit people: Those who labeled themselves as “retired” rather than “unemployed” had increased life satisfaction, according to a study by economist Clemens Hetschko, PhD, and colleagues (The Economic Journal, Vol. 124, No. 575, 2014).
“The interpretation is that the jump in life satisfaction is almost solely due to stigma, identity and changing how people treat you,” Allan explains.
Populations at risk now
The COVID-19 crisis is affecting some categories of workers more than others, researchers say. “You start looking at who is unemployed, and that is people in the service industry, and that is disproportionately women and people of color,” says Nadya Fouad, PhD, a counseling psychologist and professor of educational psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Women’s careers may also suffer if schools and child care centers do not return full time, she says, given that domestic duties and child care disproportionately fall on women. Moreover, many poor and rural Americans lack reliable broadband internet access, Van Horn says, effectively eliminating their chances of securing remote work.
Research on unemployment suggests that job loss can be particularly damaging for the health and wellness of older workers. Workers in their 50s and 60s who lose their jobs during a recession show increases in their mortality rates, possibly because the loss of health insurance is more dangerous to them than younger workers; however, losing one’s job after becoming eligible for Medicare benefits does not impact mortality (Coile, C.C., et al., American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2014).
The virus might also damage the careers of the youngest workers, says Saba Rasheed Ali, PhD, a vocational psychologist at the University of Iowa who conducts research with many youth whose families work in the meatpacking industry. These youth often work in the service industry, and many of those jobs have vanished.
“Those jobs may not be accessible to teenagers and certainly could be quite dangerous for them right now. So, how does that impact their career development and their résumés?” Ali asks. Meanwhile, schools may not be able to provide their usual levels of career counseling and development, she says.
And without more job training, teens and others may not glean the skills they need to secure new jobs. A meta-analytic review of job search interventions found that the most successful programs taught job seekers how to network, find appropriate openings and apply to them. The best programs also taught job seekers how to psychologically cope with rejection and how to stay motivated day in, day out (Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 140, No. 4, 2014).
“Job search interventions effectively promoted employment only when both skill development and motivation enhancement were emphasized in the training program,” says Songqi Liu, PhD, an industrial and organizational psychologist at Georgia State University, who co-authored the review.
Unfortunately, few programs do this well, Liu says. One that does work is the JOBS program, developed by psychologists Richard Price, PhD, and Amiram Vinokur, PhD, of the University of Michigan, which is delivered to small groups of job seekers by trained facilitators. The program focuses on building participants’ confidence and uses discussion, role-playing and positive feedback to practice job search skills. The program has been shown to be effective internationally, with studies replicated in China, Finland and Ireland, among other nations (“The JOBS Program: Impact on Job Seeker Motivation, Reemployment, and Mental Health,” Oxford Handbooks Online, 2014).
The program has also been shown to particularly improve reemployment and mental health in participants who are at high risk of poor mental health (Vinokur, A.D., & Price, R.H., in Vuori, J., et al. (eds.), “Sustainable Working Lives: Aligning Perspectives on Health, Safety and Well-Being,” Springer, Dordrecht, 2015).
In today’s pandemic, the job search is challenging for two reasons. One is that the overall economic contraction has reduced the number of new jobs available, meaning candidates face steep competition for work. A psychology-informed approach can’t help this problem, but an understanding of mental health, motivation and human behavior may be able to address the second challenge: adapting career interventions in a socially distanced way.
Although there are many online job search interventions, few are well studied, Liu says. One exception is the University of Minnesota’s Building Relationships and Improving Opportunities (BRIO) intervention, which teaches networking skills through a series of videos and online modules. In a field experiment of 491 unemployed individuals who took part in the program, Wanberg, Liu and their collaborators found that the intervention improved participants’ ability to network and their sense of self-efficacy around networking compared with a control group that did not receive the intervention (Personnel Psychology, online first publication, 2020). BRIO also helped participants translate their networking efforts into tangible benefits, which led to higher employment quality, as measured by improvements in position and income.
Psychologists who work on understanding unemployment are also mobilizing to respond to the unique aspects of the pandemic. Blustein and his colleagues are beginning a qualitative study of work and uncertainty to learn more about people’s experiences as the pandemic drags on, while simultaneously collaborating with a network of psychologists, economists and employment counselors to develop interventions to protect against the mental health impacts of job loss during this crisis. These would include traditional mental health interventions as well as career-focused interventions, Blustein says. He’s also calling on psychologists to recognize the uncertainty of the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis as an existential experience of loss (Journal of Humanistic Psychology, online first publication, 2020). Psychologists can help by advocating for policies shown to protect unemployed individuals’ mental health, including basic income guarantees and policies to provide housing security and health-care access, he says.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen in this COVID crisis, whereas in a recession you tend to know that eventually we’ll come out of it,” Blustein says. “That is a place where psychologists need to be engaged in the clinical work and in the public policy sector.”
It’s also important to view today’s economic crisis against the backdrop of work life prior to the pandemic, Allan says. Even before the coronavirus, work in the United States was increasingly precarious, he says, with more workers laboring at contract or gig positions, often with few protections or benefits. Those workers are often the ones who are now facing the most dangerous, uncertain working conditions—or at risk of losing their jobs altogether.
“Psychologists need to be at the table when we’re making policy decisions because we have a lot to bring to those discussions,” Allan says. “We have the data and the understanding of systemic issues, but we also have the connection to the voices of people who are experiencing this through our clinical work and through qualitative studies. We know how to change attitudes and promote more accurate narratives, and we need to do more of that.”