Mental Health Issues in being Unemployed
Deprive yourself of a steady income-and all of the financial, emotional/psychological stability that goes with it-and your self-esteem can plummet like a meteor way up in the atmosphere. Employment is the glue that holds our lives together. Without it, the consequences to our lives can be devastating. We are plunged into instability, fuelled by not knowing what will happen next and we easily have damaged self-esteem. Take away money, the pride that goes with employment, the stability to our lives that goes with it and we have huge emotional swings. Ultimately, the longer the unemployment, the more the battering to our psyche.
As human beings, we like to have structure, an order to our existence-our lives demand it. With food on the table and a roof over our heads, we satisfy basic primal needs for survival. With all of that removed, our worlds spin out of control, and we can suffer horribly; the longer at the job the worst. Savings and unemployment insurance are there to buffer us, but upheaval will always follow due to the uncertainty in our lives. Our prestige, our self-esteem fronts our stability. Lose the basic tenets of our lives and damage to our emotional/psychological essence quickly follows. We predicate our lives on what can be simple and complicated values at the same time: work, money, existence, survival. Driven by the reptilian parts of the human brain, we strive to survive, and employment is a key factor in survival.
Depression can easily follow as our world seemingly crumbles around us, and our survival is threatened. Usually, we make a Herculean effort to push ahead to restore the order and stability to our lives, driven by these primitive instincts. However, issues like esteem become front and center, even if some sense of financial order is restored. To not to have all of these things we cherish, we can easily fall into a pattern of depressive behavior, so exemplified by the loss of order in our lives and the battering to self-esteem that goes with it. If one has worked at a job less then a years, the odds are there'll be far less damage. Anything past two years and we feel it far more so.
In good times or bad times, losing employment can seriously affect somebody. Sometimes it doesn't show right away, as the reptilian-brain pushes us forwards. We are driven by this primitive instinct to survive. But eventually our more evolved brain centers kick in, flooding us with a plethora of very negative and positive emotions. We start to feel the effects more, as we start to put things into their proper perspectives. But these more rational ponderings also helps us to sort through the mess and ultimately restore normalcy to our lives.
