greater risk for psychiatric diagnosis, and that psychiatric diagnosis greatly limits the individual's chances for getting a new job. In other words, unemployment feeds and is fed by mental illness; longer-term unemployment puts one at risk for more severe physical health problems and less chance of real recovery, which in turn makes reemployment less likely than for physically healthy job seekers; in turn, this aggravates the likelihood of increased depression and other mental pathology--which further decreases chances for reemployment. Possible result: increased dependence on government-sponsored disability, leading to increased public expenditures in industrialized welfare states. The importance of this study is in its implications or mandates for possible public-policy interventions, and the authors make a strong case for government-sponsored preventive physical, vocational, and psychotherapeutic interventions, as a way of guarding against the need to intervene when subjects are physically or psychologically in extremis.
Crombie, I.K. (1990). Can changes in the unemployment rates explain the recent changes in suicide rates in developed countries? International Journal of Epidemiology, 19, 412-16.
This article seeks to cast suspicion on hypotheses that connect suicide to unemployment, by noting inconsistent figures for suicide rates among men and women vis-a-vis unemployment patterns from one industrialized country to another. The relationship of this study to the connection between unemployment and psychological status is that it thwarts commonsense expectations that suicide is one possible outcome of extreme depression due to joblessness. However, because the two phenomena cannot be consistently correlated, either across countries or between sexes no cause-effect condition can be established. The problem with this study is that it relies too much on statistics and charts and not enough on variables that may have meaning for p...