what effact has this crisis had on your own mental and emotional health ?
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The character Gordon Gecko in the film ‘Wall Street’ lived by the mantra ‘Greed is Good’. The events that unfolded towards the end of 2008 exposed in dramatic fashion the downside to greed and led to the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Economic contagion in the US spread rapidly as many countries experienced failures in key businesses, declines in consumer wealth and increased financial debts. While the economic and political implications have been studied in detail, the impact on health – especially that of mental health – has received much less attention. This essay aims to achieve a critical analysis of causality (or lack thereof) between an economic crisis and mental health, using a combination of statistical review, psychological theories and common logic. This will hopefully impact on our understanding of the causes of mental health problems in times of economic insecurity and assist in developing strategies to ameliorate them.
While an economic downturn is quantifiable, it is not an easy task with mental health. For the purposes of this essay we propose a view of five principal components of mental health, which have been accepted by many Western philosophers and summarized by Peter Warr from the University of Sheffield.1 These five interacting components of mental health are affective wellbeing, competence, autonomy, aspiration and integrated functioning. However, we recognize that there are other ways of conceptualizing the component of mental health.
The crux of this essay is an analysis of causation between the economic downturn and these components of mental health. The downturn is likely to exert its impact through a series of interlinked factors, but studies highlight that job-related problems, particularly unemployment, are the key determinant risk factors for mental-health-related difficulties.
Clearly, unemployment is a major concern in times of an economic crisis. Prospective studies unsurprisingly show that unemployment has a causal influence on depression.2 Common sense dictates that depression will reduce the chance of re-employment and reintegration into an already strained economy and eventually the chronically unemployed suffer increased debts. Longitudinal data show that financial difficulties lead to increased major depression,3 with housing payment problems and consumer debt leading to poorer mental health. In short, the quintessential ‘vicious cycle’.
In relation to the components of mental health, longitudinal studies indicate significant deterioration in affective wellbeing after job loss,4 with individuals scoring lowly on separate indices of affective wellbeing such as being content and having anxiety and depression. Competence is expected to decline following unemployment because of loss of skills which might be applied in future jobs. The constraints of unemployment might be thought also to cause reduction in autonomy, with studies showing that belief in self-direction and locus of control decrease.
Those keeping their jobs are not immune to the effects of the crisis. Anxiety about job insecurity complicates existing depression and acts as a chronic stressor with cumulative effects over time.5 On the basis of the five components of mental health, job insecurity most likely affects the aspects of autonomy and aspiration. The autonomy of the individual to determine and control his workload is threatened by the contraction of the workforce as this usually implies that the remaining employees bear an expanded workload. Thus, the aspiration of the individual to pursue opportunities of employment is restricted by fewer choices and more stringent job requirements in the labour market.
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