The Most Depressing Jobs
- added October 15, 2007
- 8 responses
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- jcharney
- added this
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- related topics
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- Jobs (244)
- Psychology (238)
- Depression (114)
- Mental Health (106)
- Labor (102)
- Employment (101)
Among the 21 major occupational categories, the highest rates of past year major depressive episodes (MDE) among full-time workers aged 18 to 64 were found in the personal care and service occupations (10.8 percent) and the food preparation and serving related occupations (10.3 percent) (Figure 1). The occupational categories with the lowest rates of past year MDE were engineering, architecture, and surveying (4.3 percent); life, physical, and social science (4.4 percent); and installation, maintenance, and repair (4.4 percent).
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I can't believe media beat out legal but why are engineers/architects not trippin' out more? I mean they're involved with the safety of the public. Their mistakes can lead to buildings/bridges falling down.
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surprised to not see "basement librarian" on the list...
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I can't believe anything beat out legal. I remember some study a few years back about the high rates of depression and substance abuse in the legal profession. Wish I could remember the source of the study...
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Pure collector ... now that sounds interesting. Wait, what!?! "Pure" refers to animal feces?
"Get down and dirty with a fascinating career in coprolite collection. Dog and cat poop takes various forms, from stumpy little nuggets to sludgy piles with grass in, and as for the white ones what ever happened to those? But if you know your quality faeces from your average dump, apply immediately.
This role involves travelling the streets of London, most probably mainly on your hands and knees, sniffing out those stinky critters. Of course, there will be no protective gear, and the pooper scooper hasn't been invented yet, so you'll be bare-handing the pooch poo straight into your pockets and knapsack.
Once you've collected a good load, you can guarantee that a path will automatically clear before you, all the way to the tanners. There they will pay you a princely sum for the plops to add to the stinking urine they already have in their sweet tanning sumps." -
Possibly the jobs are depressing, but it's also possible that certain occupations attract people prone to depression, and vice-versa...
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Good point mshen!
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These are interesting numbers in the sense that they give you a window into the minds of each of these professionals... Think about it a little and you can really find ways to explain why the results are pretty accurate in what you would think would make someone depressed or more prone to that reality or which careers people prone to depression would choose but not necessarily because of their depression but factors thereof.
I would love to see if my thoughts on the numbers would actually mesh up with what the participants stated as factors for their depression and how that related to their career or somehow influenced their career choice. Or if perhaps one did not become depressed for sure until after having said career. For example I feel like when you work in the home health care or hospice environment, it is such a reality check on a daily basis, such an affirmation that things aren't always fair, or sometimes too cruely fair, it would eventually chip away at your mental state until you yourself would feel a little hopeless at the end of the day. So, I would venture to say they (home health care workers) didn't necessarily enter the field depressed. I doubt a truly depressed person would even want to interact with the possibility of having a glimpse of what their future might be, but it takes a certain positiveness to be able to care for someone in that state. It seems it would be, in effect, a jaded perspective that would lead you to depression. Things that make you go Hmmmmm.
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