Unemployment and mental health:: Hazards and challenges of psychology in the community

There is persuasive evidence for both social causal and individual drift relationships between unemployment and mental health disorders over 80 years of massive social change, differing countries. vastly increasing research method sophistication and differing value assumptions. The number of people at risk of negative psychological effects of unemployment is appalling and usually greatly underestimated. There are also grounds for believing that unemployment negatively affects far more people than just those who are actually unemployed. Given the scale of unemployment and its negative consequences on mental health, interventions to prevent or reduce the psychological costs are dearly important. However many, perhaps most, actual interventions seem problematic regarding their psychological impacts and the dominant psychological account of what it is about being unemployed which causes mental health problems has a number of serious problems at a variety of levels. It is suggested that new ways of conceptualising and investigating the psychological problems of unemployment are needed and that in order to address the conditions which damage the mental health of both employed and unemployed people, it may well be necessary to redesign not only the substandard jobs of many employed people but also the jobs of unemployed people too.