Do you have the most depressing job?
This past Saturday, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) released a report entitled, Depression Among Adults Employed Full-time by Occupancy Category. According to the study, 7% of full-time workers in the US had a “major depressive episode (MDE)” in the past year, with part-time workers at 9.3 % and unemployed at a whopping 12.7%.
SAMHSA examined 21 major occupational categories among workers ages 18 to 64. The rankings in the table below show a percentage of those experiencing a MDE in the past twelve months:
Women were found to be more than twice as likely as men to experience a MDE, and those aged 18 to 25 were at a higher percentage than their older counterparts.
SAMHSA concluded that these challenges can significantly impact a person’s ability to perform routine activities at work, costing an estimated $30 to $44 billion dollars per year in lost productivity, employee absenteeism and low morale.
Let’s keep the conversation going.
October 15th, 2007 at 11:34 am
N.B. personal and service rank the highest for occupations that result in depression. There are 57 million Americans who are providing caregiving to loved ones today, with no reimbursement or recompense. Consequently, they are as prone to depression as the ones who get paid to “care.” Imagine if the depression data applied to them: 6.17 million of personal care and service caregivers experience bouts of depression annually. When those bouts occur, who steps in and provides the caregiving services? We have a fragile infrastructure for meeting the needs of the chronically ill and these data demonstrate that it might only get worse as family/neighborhood/community bonds fray.