Race, unemployment rate, and chronic mental illness: a 15-year trend analysis

Abstract

Our results confirmed that structural risk posed by the recent recession and by vulnerability to the recession's effects was differentially linked to Blacks. This led to the group's high probability of chronic mental illness, observed even when individual-level social structural and demographic factors were controlled. Future research should specify the particular kinds of vulnerability that created the additional disadvantage experienced by Black respondents.

Health Impacts of the Great Recession: a Critical Review

“…In contrast, three separate U.S. studies using national survey data reported significant population-wide increases in psychological distress [52–54]. Although these studies did not examine heterogeneity by gender or age, two analyses indicated that non-Hispanic black (NHB) and/or Hispanic individuals experienced particularly large escalations in psychological distress [26, 53]. Evidence also suggested that Americans were more adversely affected by the Recession than Europeans due to the U.S.’s lack of robust safety net programs, which may mitigate the psychological impact of job loss [44].…”

“…Men were more likely than women to suffer ill physical and mental health consequences [24, 61, 63, 70, 72, 74, 89], and minority racial/ethnic groups also experienced more negative health effects [14, 26, 52, 53, 79]. Fertility declined primarily among younger women [14–16].…”

Longitudinal trends in self-reported anxiety. Effects of age and birth cohort during 25 years

“…Today, the entrance to the labour market has been delayed to a higher age, which is due to increased educational demands at the labour market and unemployment in young adults [8]. Such mechanisms may lie behind our findings of increased reporting of anxiety in young individuals [8, 25, 26]. In the 1990s, Sweden underwent a financial crisis which, among other things, resulted in increased unemployment rates and poverty in youths while older generations experienced a more favourable development [5, 8].…”

Coping with Economic Stress: A Test of Deterioration and Stress-Suppressing Models

“…The impact of ethnic minority group membership expresses itself through (a) the differential risk of stress, (b) the variation in the appraisal of stress, and (c) the effect of stress-mediating variables (Aranda & Knight, 1997). Ethnic minority populations are thought to be most affected by economic stress (Lo & Cheng, 2014;Zemore, Mulia, Jones-Webb, Liu, & Schmidt, 2013), largely because of the pronounced disparity in most socioeconomic indicators (e.g., income, net worth, asset ownership) between ethnic minority groups and the white majority. For example, the median household wealth of whites was 13 times black and 10 times Latino households in 2013 (Kochhar & Fry, ISSN: 1945-7774 CC by-NC 4.0 2017 Financial Therapy Association 83 2014).…”