{"id":229025,"date":"2025-08-19T11:03:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T18:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/?p=229025"},"modified":"2025-08-19T11:03:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T18:03:11","slug":"the-hidden-health-toll-of-job-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/the-hidden-health-toll-of-job-loss\/","title":{"rendered":"The Hidden Health Toll of Job Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Zack Kaldveer via LinkedIn<\/a> Campanha Trabalho Saud\u00e1vel<\/p>\n

What happens when millions of Americans lose stable, good-paying jobs\u2014not because of performance, but because of corporate outsourcing, automation, or deregulation?<\/p>\n

According to decades of research, including M. Harvey Brenner\u2019s landmark book Mental Illness and the Economy, economic instability and job loss are directly tied to increased rates of mental illness. His analysis of over a century of data revealed that economic downturns are a primary driver of admissions to state mental hospitals.<\/p>\n

More recently, The Disposable American (https:\/\/lnkd.in\/gD6PVKjk<\/a>) by Louis Uchitelle and The Far-Reaching Impact of Job Loss and Unemployment (https:\/\/lnkd.in\/gvXg-q3N<\/a>) by Jennie Brand echoed this reality: layoffs don\u2019t just harm individual workers\u2014they unravel families, communities, and long-term health outcomes.<\/p>\n

Dr. Don Goldmacher, Healthy Work Campaign (HWC) Board Member, Community Psychiatrist, Co-Director of the documentary Heist: Who Stole the American Dream, and key contributor to this post, breaks it down:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen someone loses their job, they experience shame, self-blame, loss of self-worth, and economic anxiety. That often triggers a downward spiral\u2014depression, substance use, family breakdown, even suicidal ideation. And when this happens at scale, entire communities collapse. Small businesses close. Families move. Social cohesion disintegrates. And the mental health system is rarely equipped\u2014or willing\u2014to deal with the root causes.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, why is this still ignored? Why do our systems continue to treat job loss as an individual failure rather than a public health emergency?<\/p>\n

This is why HWC exists: to expose the psychosocial impacts of job loss, promote structural solutions, and challenge the narratives that blame workers for crises they didn\u2019t create.<\/p>\n

What can employers do instead of turning layoffs into trauma? Our proposed solutions (https:\/\/lnkd.in\/gsPNmNbA<\/a>) include:
\n\u00b7\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Reduce hours, not people \u2013 Explore furloughs or shorter workweeks as alternatives to permanent layoffs.
\n\u00b7\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Be transparent, early \u2013 Communicate openly with workers, unions, and local communities before decisions are made.
\n\u00b7 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Invest in your people \u2013 Offer job retraining, upskilling, and cross-training to help workers adapt and grow.
\n\u00b7\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Support the search \u2013 Give laid-off workers paid time to job hunt and prepare for their next step.
\n\u00b7\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Prioritize mental health \u2013 Provide counseling and support services to those impacted.
\n\u00b7\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Don\u2019t double the burden \u2013 After layoffs, make sure remaining staff aren\u2019t silently doing 2\u20133 jobs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to center dignity, stability, and health in economic and labor policy.<\/p>\n

From Neglect to Crisis \u2014 How Trump\u2019s Agenda Deepens Worker Exploitation and Public Harm<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we detailed in our recent op-ed \u201cSick and Unsafe\u201d, Trump\u2019s policies are supercharging this public health emergency\u2014fueling mass layoffs, dismantling worker protections, and dehumanizing federal employees in ways we\u2019ve never seen at this scale.<\/p>\n

This is not just bad policy. It\u2019s a deliberate strategy: stripping away rights, targeting public servants, and creating economic \u201cdeserts\u201d where despair thrives. The impact on the health of working people has been all too real: Self-blame, loss of self-worth, economic stress, substance use, family breakdown, depression and even suicidal ideation.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the truth: the working class was abandoned long before Trump. For decades, both major parties have failed to protect good jobs, allowed corporate outsourcing and deregulation to erode local economies, and turned a blind eye to the psychosocial toll this takes.<\/p>\n

The US never fully embraced a serious industrial policy that invests in and sustains domestic manufacturing. Instead, we doubled down on \u201cfree trade\u201d agreements that hollowed out industries and shipped millions of blue-collar\u00a0 jobs overseas, while failing to value the long-term economic and social benefits of making things here at home.<\/p>\n

Decades of neglecting strategic investment in key sectors\u2014while other nations protected and nurtured theirs\u2014left our workforce vulnerable and our economic base gutted. This, combined with a systematic attack on unions and the already weak social safety net\u2014ignited by Reagan and driven by the right wing ever since\u2014left tens of millions of workers and their families and communities on the junk heap to wither away, leaving them psychologically vulnerable to emotional manipulation by a right wing demagogue candidate posing as an \u201coutsider\u201d who would fix a broken system.<\/p>\n

Many working people believed him\u2014because the anger and betrayal they felt were real. But now, the reality is undeniable: far from fixing the system, Trump has deepened the wounds, handed more power to corporate elites, and left the same communities even more vulnerable.<\/p>\n

We must not only fight against the symptoms of economic injustice, but against the policies and narratives that create them too. If we want a healthy, dignified future for working people, we have to start by telling the truth: job loss is not just an economic inconvenience. It\u2019s a public health crisis resulting from policies that prioritize shifting capital and resources from working people to wealthy people and corporations. It’s time to stop electing leaders who make it worse and start putting worker health first.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Zack Kaldveer via LinkedIn Healthy Work Campaign What happens when millions of Americans lose stable, good-paying jobs\u2014not because of performance, but because of corporate outsourcing, automation, or deregulation? According to decades of research, including M. Harvey Brenner\u2019s landmark book Mental Illness and the Economy, economic instability and job loss are directly tied to increased […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[141,28,121,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-healthy-work-campaign","category-psychological-health-outcomes","category-stroke","category-causes-workplace-stressors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229025"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229025\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":229028,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229025\/revisions\/229028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.healthywork.org\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}