Giving Compass' Take:

• The Atlantic points out that individuals who experience job loss have worsened mental and physical health, and the research shows that immediately getting any job right after is not the healthiest solution. 

• What are healthier ways besides getting a new job after losing an old way can individuals start to adopt-- particularly to better their mental health? 

• Read about the complexities of worker retraining and the population who are hit the hardest by job loss. 

Any job is better than no job.

Or at least that’s the thinking when it comes to preserving physical and mental health after unemployment. Indeed, many studies have found that the long-term unemployed have at least twice the rate of depression and anxiety, as well as higher rates of heart attacks and strokes. One study on Pennsylvania men weathering the 1980s recession found that a year after they were laid off, the men’s risk of dying doubled. And as one review of the most recent recession put it,

Nearly all individual-level studies indicated that job loss, financial strain, and housing issues were associated with declines in self-rated health during the Great Recession.

“Employment is the essential element of social status,” said the public-health researcher M. Harvey Brenner in 2002, the year he authored a major study that showed that unemployment is associated with a greater risk of death. “When that is taken away, people become susceptible to depression, cardiovascular disease, AIDS, and many other illnesses that increase mortality.”

Compared to those who remained unemployed, those who moved into poorer-quality jobs had higher markers of inflammation and a lower creatinine clearance rate, a measure of how well the kidneys are functioning. Those in better jobs, meanwhile, had less inflammation. Those in good health were more likely to get any kind of job in the first place, so the findings can’t be explained by the subjects’ health status at the outset.

Those who moved into good jobs also scored higher on mental health than those who remained unemployed, but those who moved into poor-quality jobs did not see improvements in mental health. In other words, the simple act of working, say, a minimum-wage job wasn’t enough to boost the participants’ mental health.

Read about job employment by Olga Khazan at The Atlantic