Chronic Unemployment Crushes Health

Chronic unemployment undermines a person’s sense of freedom in a free society. That is one of the reasons the extended economic downturn, in its third year and perhaps still in progress, has done such a great deal to harm the morale of average citizens.  Many jobless people have now lost their unemployment insurance benefits and it is unlikely that Congress will help them out. Voters have become surly about growing national deficits and incumbents are afraid.
The number of people without long-term government support is about 2 million now and will increase by as many as several hundred thousand a month. The total will be more than 3 million at the year’s end, barring some miracle.

New data from Gallup shows that the troubles of the unemployed extend
beyond the economic and psychological, especially among the young.
It is possible that the promise of some level of prosperity denied to them so early intheir working lives causes them an unusual level of depression or substance abuse
e.

The new Gallup employment poll states that “The number of poor health days in a month triples among those aged 18-29 who have been unemployed more than 6 months, compared with those unemployed for less time.” The rate of low energy and poor sleep are important signs of depression.

The figures are extraordinarily high. When asked has many days a month did poor health keep those asked from doing usual activities, among the
young chronically unemployed, the number was 6.3 days, a full fifth of their
time.  Unemployed people between 50 and 65 years old felt unable to do their normal activities 4.5 days a month. The figure was the same between those unemployed more than  six months and under.

It is intuitive to expect  that older people are less resilient and also
more likely to feel poorly day in and day out. The Gallup numbers show
that, among the unemployed, this is not true. The resilience of the
young is depressingly low.

Polls usually do not predict the future, although some predict trends. The Gallup data does not, in the case of this study, reach any conclusions. But it cannot be good  that a generation of people who have
not been able to find work for long periods has lapsed into a depressed state. This could get much worse as the American economy does little better than slide sideways with nearly no chance that there will be any significant job creation either this year or early next. Employers have learned too well how to do with less.

It is too dramatic and unsupportable to say that America is losing part of a generation to a particularly high level of  despair. There is no first-hand memory of how the Depression affected the jobless young. Many of those people went into the service in WWII, so that period eighty years ago may not be comparable to today.

The strength of the US, especially five or ten years from now, will
be largely in the hands of those who are young now. The federal deficit
will be higher than it is today and will be particularly burdensome by then. The country will be torn between austerity and higher taxes as remedies for these problems and may have to take both paths.
Programs including Social Security, which by 2020 will have been
a safety net for almost a century, will probably have to be cut back.
It will be a period of crisis, and one that will be poorly tolerated by those who have been damaged by despair. 
But some of the young who cannot find work today may be just that in a decade.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking/the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index survey April 19-July 6, 2010, with a random sample of 3,772 unemployed adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.