FDI Unemployment and Its Effects

FDI Unemployment and Its Effects on Mental Health In the United States, each percentage rise in unemployment leads to 6,000 deaths (Woolston, 2002). This is a harsh yet realistic estimate. While many people argue that some Americans enjoy being unemployed, as they no longer have to deal with taking orders or other responsibilities related to working, losing a job is incredibly stressful for most people. Money runs out quickly, social networks disintegrate, and self-esteem decreases in many cases. Numerous studies reveal that unemployment can result in serious mental and physical illnesses.

According to Woolston (2002): "Grief, uncertainty, self-doubt are textbook responses to losing a job. it's also a recipe for a breakdown of mental health." A recent study of 897 married couples surveyed by researchers at the University of Western Ontario demonstrated that depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and other mental health problems were often linked to unemployment. For example, males who had lost jobs within the last four years were three times more likely than employed men to have recently abused alcohol (Woolston, 2002).

Similarly, women who were unemployed for a significant amount of time were three times more likely than other women to have suffered from depression. Approximately 30% of all subjects with a history of job loss had also suffered a serious mental health problem, compared with 19% of people who had steady employment. Unemployment can hit individual job seekers hard (Wikipedia, 2004). The unemployed often lack social contact with peers, a feeling of productivity, and the ability to pay bills and enjoy a decent standard of living. Dr. M.

Harvey Brenner, among other researchers, has suggested that increasing unemployment raises the crime rate, the suicide rate, and encourages poor health. Because unemployment insurance in the United States typically does not even replace 50% of the income one received on the job (and is limited), the unemployed often end up relying on welfare programs such as Food Stamps -- or accumulating debt, both formal debt to banks and informal debt to family and friends.

Recent research has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that unemployment causes, rather than merely results from, poor psychological health (Fryer, 1995). For many, researchers using quantitative psychological methods have made the greatest contemporary input. Anxiety, depression, dissatisfaction with one's life, experienced strain, negative self-esteem, hopelessness regarding the future and other negative emotional states have each been demonstrated in complex studies to be higher in unemployed people than in similar groups of employed people (Fryer, 1995).

There is also an agreement that the physical, as well as mental health of unemployed people, is also generally lower than that of employed people. Marie Jahoda said that employment is a social institution with objective consequences that occur for all effected by it, overriding individual differences in feelings, thoughts, motivation and purpose (Fryer, 1995). Some of these, like earning a living, are intended or manifest. Others are unintended or latent.

According to Jahoda (Fryer, 1995): " employment makes the following categories of experience inevitable: it imposes a time structure on the waking day; it compels contacts and shared experiences with others outside the nuclear family; it demonstrates that there are goals and purposes which are beyond the scope of an individual but require a collectivity; it imposes status and social identity through the division of labour in modern employment; it enforces activity..." For many people, the stress of being unemployed is devastating (Woolston, 2002).

A recent study of more than 500,000 people in Great Britain revealed that people who said they were unemployed in a 1981 census were approximately three times more likely than employed people to commit suicide in the next decade. Job loss seems to result in a serious erosion in people's sense of control and self-esteem," says William R. Avison, Ph.D., professor of sociology and leader of the University of Western Ontario study (Woolston, 2002).

Because control and self-esteem are two limitations of mental health, it is understandable that unemployment affects people so deeply, he argues. Avison observes that some of.