Did you know the psychological impacts of unemployment?

Losing a job can be a particularly difficult experience. Indeed, losing one's job can mean losing one's source of income, and therefore compromising a certain vision of the future, but depending on what one finds at work, it can also mean a loss of social status and of self-esteem. In short, an uncertain future and a not very happy present are enough factors to lead some a cruel depression. But after the blow, what are the long-term consequences of a period of unemployment?

Part of the answer can be found in a large study, called GSEPS, which provides access to the socio-economic conditions as well as the personal satisfaction of many people. If previous studies seem to show, from the 1930s and until recently, that unemployment leaves an “emotional scar,” a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology and Economics calls this view into question. For this, it is based on the heterogeneity of reactions to unemployment.

They therefore divided a group of 774 people affected by unemployment, into four groups. First, the majority of respondents (69%) had a high and stable level of personal satisfaction before their dismissal. They show themselves to be the most affected when they lose their jobs, but a year later have found a comparable level of satisfaction. Next come those (around 15%) whose level of satisfaction was increasing before the fateful ordeal: their satisfaction also returns to the level before the dismissal. People who initially had little satisfaction (13%) were hardly affected, and finally those whose satisfaction declined (4%) continued to see it drop, until a rebound three years after the loss employment. They were also the least likely to find a job.

In addition, we realize that the economic climate has a strong influence on the feeling of satisfaction of citizens, and more particularly when massive redundancy plans are geographically close. According to the authors, this would suggest that workers are in fact more stressed about potentially losing their job than when they actually lose it. Fear of loss would ultimately have more of an effect than the loss itself, which is hardly reassuring in difficult economic times.

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