The May 8 issue of the journal, Demography, contains the report of a study on the health of people who’ve lost their jobs.  The report says people who lose their jobs, for any reason, are at heightened risk for major illnesses that include depression, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and stroke.  When a job is lost through no fault of the employee, such as in the case of company downsizing, mergers, and closures, the risk of major illness increases.

Kate Strully, lead author of the study, analyzed employment data collected in 1991, 2001, and 2003.  Her analysis revealed a 54% increase in the likelihood a person would report poor health after a job loss even when the person was healthy with no medical complaints at the time the job was lost.  Stress-related medical issues increased by 83%.  Strully reports being confident these changes in health status are a result of the lost jobs.

Strully, a State University of New York at Albany assistant professor of sociology, predicts the likelihood of poor health after job loss is even greater in today’s economic crisis than it was during the years employment data was examined.  During the study years, jobs were more plentiful and the length of unemployment was most likely shorter than can be expected today.  The mortgage industry had not collapsed during the years in the study, either, so unemployed workers in those years didn’t have the stress of losing their homes, too, and money, in general, was more plentiful then than it is now.  Today’s credit freeze means unemployed workers can’t rely on borrowing money to get through the job hunt like they might have done in the 1990s and early 2000s, either.

For many workers, losing a job means also losing health insurance coverage but Strully’s study suggests insurance makes little difference on the ill effects of job loss.  People who continued to have access to medical insurance and health care even after job loss were just as likely to suffer the same stress-related illnesses as those who were no longer covered.