Berkeley Public Health study quantifies how job loss adds to depression in aging adults
- 3 min. read ▪ Published
Job loss over age 50 has become common in the United States. Not surprisingly, studies have shown a correlation between job loss and depression.
Yet until now, no study has pinpointed the precise burden of depressive symptoms that can be attributed to job loss in this age group.
A UC Berkeley School of Public Health study published in the October 2024 issue of The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, begins to fill that research gap.
Sally Picciotto, associate researcher of environmental health sciences, harnessed data from The Health and Retirement Study, a longitudinal household survey conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.
Picciotto reviewed data from a cohort of more than 18,500 people aged 50 or over from 1992 through 2018. Respondents self-reported their depressive symptoms in repeated surveys using the 8-item Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale.
The researchers found that 11% of the respondents with high depressive symptoms scores who had lost a job would not have had so many depressive symptoms had they not lost their employment.
Over the study period, women who lost their jobs had more depressive symptoms at baseline than men with similar experiences. Twenty three percent of the women reported at least five depressive symptoms in at least one survey, compared to only 14% of the men, and the estimated burden attributable to job loss was twice as high for women as it was for men.
The estimated attributable burden also differed by race: Involuntary job loss explained nearly twice as much of the burden of depressive symptoms in white respondents than it did in Black respondents, even though the overall prevalence of depressive symptoms and the overall probability of job loss were both very similar in the two groups.
“One possible explanation is that the [depression survey] questions might not capture mental distress in older non-white Americans as well as they do for older white Americans,’’ the authors wrote.
In an interview, Dr. Picciotto said she initially found the estimates by race surprising. However, research does suggest that Black Americans are exposed to more life stressors than their white counterparts of the same age. However, Black Americans don’t rate single stressors to be as upsetting as white people do.
“It speaks to resilience,” Picciotto said. “Black Americans have really had to cultivate resilience both as a community and as individuals. There’s less of that for a lot of white Americans…. There may [also] be a real sense of entitlement for some white Americans, who think, ‘Well, it’s always been my job, how can they take that away from me?’”
Picciotto also said she had expected the job-loss attributable burden of depressive symptoms to be higher among those who lost a job—more like 30% rather than 11%.
She noted, as a limitation of the study, that depressive symptoms were only captured once every two years, using questions referring to the preceding week.
“Thus we can not know if someone was depressed for several months but then recovered before their next interview, though likewise, we cannot know if someone with five depressive symptoms was just having a particularly rough week.”