Is Economic Instability Making You Depressed?

I've been trying to crank out a post every week on the subject of depression as laid out in the book Lost Connections. I missed last week, so I'm shooting for two this week.

Anyway, here's another pic for my post to social media:

Johann Hari titles this chapter, "Disconnection from a Hopeful or Secure Future", and it's chapter 12. He discusses the solution in chapter 22.

Hari mentions several examples of people that have lost a sense of a future. He starts by discussing a Native American chief before and after his tribe was forced onto a reservation, and the effects of it today. He talks about a study done that used both anorexic children and depressed children. And he talked about a personal friend working a shit job. The depressed people all had the same thing in common, and that's the lack of an ability to perceive the future.

My last post talked about how a lack of control over your workplace makes you depressed. This chapter discusses how not having a sense of a good future leads to depression. And how economic instability causes that.

While there were non-economic reasons given for this cause of depression, poor economic health is a major one for most of us, so that's where I'm going to focus this post, as many of us can relate to this cause, and the solution is also an economic one.

Towards the end of the chapter, Hari decided to meet up with an old friend from college named Angela. Angela was very happy and carefree in college. He described her as:

"One of those people who seemed to be doing everything at once—starring in a play, reading Tolstoy, being everyone’s best friend, going out with the hottest boys. She was like a firework of adrenaline, cocktails, and old books."

After college, she couldn't get a job because potential employers saw her as overqualified. Desperate for work, she took a job as a telemarketer. The job paid just above minimum wage. It had no set schedule. If she did poorly in sales, her hours were cut the next week. If she could get a full schedule, she'd have enough money to make lunches from chicken and take the bus to work. If not, she'd be forced to eat beans and walk. She would constantly be berated by her boss and powerless to fight back against him. It's the type of job that one only takes if they're extremely desperate for work, and too powerless to fight back against a boss that deserves to be taken out back and beaten with a metal pipe until dead.

Of course Angela was depressed. She, like many of us, lives a life of temporary personal survival that you have without any sense of financial security. She couldn't even take a vacation if she could somehow afford it, because she doesn't even know what her work schedule is going to be like. She couldn't envision any future outside of the current week because her job made it that way.

A lot of us are the same way. If you're financially insecure, you're in constant survival mode. You can't think long term, because you're just trying to survive to the next day, or at best, until the next paycheck. It's easy to understand how that much stress can cause mental health issues.

In chapter 22, Hari makes a case for what he thinks would be the solution. A universal basic income.

Hari talks about an experiment the Canadian government did in the 1970s. The government decided to give the population of a few small towns the equivalent of $19,000 in today's US dollars, no questions asked. The results were phenomenal in both improving the mental health of the population, and also helping people have the means to secure their own future. To quote:

"Depression and anxiety in the community fell significantly. When it came to severe depression and other mental health disorders that were so bad the patient had to be hospitalized, there was a drop of 9 percent in just three years.

...

It had another unanticipated effect, she told me. If you know you have enough money to live on securely, no matter what happens, you can turn down a job that treats you badly, or that you find humiliating. “It makes you less of a hostage to the job you have, and some of the jobs that people work just in order to survive are terrible, demeaning jobs,” she says. It gave you “that little bit of power to say—I don’t need to stay here.” That meant that employers had to make work more appealing. And over time, it was poised to reduce inequality in the town—which we would expect to reduce the depression caused by extreme status differences."

And contrary to popular opinion, it didn't cause the population to become lazy. While there was some reduction in hours, that time not working was spent being better parents to their kids. In other cases, it caused people to get an education so they could work at a job they wanted to be a part of, instead of being forced into working a shit job.

Hari noted that popular opinion keeps a universal basic income from being possible. Everyone knows that if they had more economic freedom, they'd use it to better themselves. You'd spend more time with your kids (if you have any). You'd go to school. You'd spend your free time volunteering. What you wouldn't do is stay home and watch Netflix all day. Unfortunately many people think that's what everyone else would be doing.

Now, I don't agree with Hari's ideas about a universal basic income, but that's because the numbers were crunched, and it would cause the U.S. national budget to double. It's simply not affordable. However, we can and should find ways to make sure that the basic needs of people are met regardless of whether or not they are gainfully employed.

We have four basic needs. We need food, shelter, education, and medical care. We should be finding ways to make sure that everyone has those basic needs met without forcing them to work. Everyone should have access to all of those things regardless of whether or not they are working. And before anyone says, "That just rewards laziness", look two paragraphs up. When the basic income experiment was done, people still worked. They'll still work because they want to, and also for one other reason:

Luxuries wouldn't be promised. We love luxuries, and all of us are willing to work for them. For some of us, having a kick ass, HDTV with a giant screen is a luxury we want. For others, it's an awesome vacation. For me, it's to have a membership at a good gym, another one at a good dojo, and plenty of time to put some hot lead downrange. All of that takes money, and none of that would be promised to me just because I didn't have to work to avoid starvation and homelessness.

I read this book about a year ago when I was still working as a security officer at an oil refinery. It explained very well why I was depressed. Not only did I hate the lack of control at my job (I was ordered to go to different places hourly, and all of my suggestions to improve the place went into the "deleted" section of my boss' email), but I had to constantly pick up extra shifts to make ends meet. For me, working 60 hours a week wasn't weird. It was just something I had to do. And I was depressed because of it. Now, I have a job that pays much more. I don't have to work overtime now. I'm staying home and doing dad shit.

When I talk to people about supporting programs that would eliminate the need to work for survival, I mention both the mental illness benefits of such programs, but I also talk about it in terms of freedom. Every day, millions of Americans go to work at jobs they hate and do it just so they can barely get paid enough to survive. This country talks a big game about freedom, but if you are forced to work to survive, you are not free. This is known as wage slavery, not to be confused with chattel slavery, which is in and of itself a horrific practice, but it's a form of slavery nonetheless. If our country is going to talk a big game about freedom, we need to find ways to make us truly free. The system of wage slavery needs to be abolished. Our country and our mental health will be better off as a result.