Inpatient Psychiatric Hospitalization Following Involuntary Job Loss

This article examines the impact of involuntary job loss on mental health as measured by admission to inpatient psychiatric treatment. Specifically, we investigate the impact on admission due to affective disorders, alcohol or drug abuse, and nervous or stress-related disorders. We focus on job loss due only to establishment closures, as this focus reduces the problem of distinguishing between causation and selection. Using linked employee-employer register data, we identify the job losses due to all establishment closures in Sweden in 1987-88. During a subsequent 12-year period we find that job loss significantly increased the risk of overall inpatient psychiatric hospital admission among women but not among men. When the results are broken down into the specific categories of mental disorders, we find that inpatient psychiatric treatment due to affective disorders and alcohol or drug abuse is significantly higher among the displaced women but we find no such effect for nervous or stress-related disorders. Among men, we find no significant impact of job loss on any of the categories of discharge diagnoses.