Louis Uchitelle, an economics writer at The New York Times, discussed mental health and job layoffs at the June meeting of APsaA. His new book, The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences, chronicles the rise of job security over 90 years, starting in the late 19th century, its contribution to the nation's industrial and commercial success, and then the dismantling of job security starting in the mid-1970s. Layoffs became the chief tool in this dismantling, and by the end of the century, we as a people had acquiesced. In doing so, we have failed to recognize the damage to mental health that layoffs inflict—a damage that Uchitelle documents in his book with narrative accounts of men and women who were laid off. The following excerpt from The Disposable American speaks to the issue.
In the cataloguing of damage that results from layoffs, incapacitating emotional illness almost never appears on the lists that economists, politicians, sociologists, union leaders, business school professors, management consultants, and journalists compile. There is much discussion of income loss, downward mobility, a decrease in family cohesion, a rise in the divorce rate, the unwinding of communities, the impact on children, the impact on survivors who dodge a layoff but are left feeling insecure and guilty that they kept their jobs while colleagues did not. Extended periods of unemployment bring a cascade of damages, including depression, and these too are documented….
The layoff, however, is seldom singled out as damaging in itself, quite apart from the unemployment that follows. But the trauma of dismissal—the “acuteness of the blow,” as Theodore J. Jacobs, a prominent New York psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry, put it—unwinds lives in its own right, damaging self-esteem, undoing normal adaptive mechanisms, and erecting the sort of emotional barriers that have prevented…millions of (people) from returning energetically to the workforce in jobs that draw productively on their education and skills. “There are many people who do not want to face that trauma again and to some degree they lose a sense of reality,” Jacobs said. “They give themselves a lot of conscious reasons why they cannot accept this job or that job, but deeper down they don't want to face the rigors and anxieties of work and the fears they won't be up to it and they will be dropped again.”
I did not think in the early stages of the reporting for this book that I would be drawn so persistently into the psychiatric aspect of layoffs. But a surprisingly high number of laid off people with whom I talked described from every angle and over and over again what, in their minds, had been done to them, the mistakes they had made, their bad luck in being caught in the particular situation that cost them their jobs, the short-sightedness or outright evil of bosses who failed to protect them or did not want to do so, how cut adrift they felt or, hiding their loss and hurt in elaborate rationalizations, how comfortable they insisted they were in some new way of life, safely separated from challenging work.
The emotional damage was too palpable to ignore. Whenever I insisted that layoffs were a phenomenon in America beyond their control, they agreed perfunctorily and then went right back to describing their own devaluing experiences, and why it was somehow their fault or their particular bad luck. When I turned to psychiatrists and psychologists for an explanation of what I was finding, they offered similar observations of their own. “Chipping away at human capital,” Jacobs called it. “Even when a person accurately realizes that he has done a good job, that the company is in a bad way, that it has to lay off a lot of people and it is not about me, there is always some sense of diminishment. Others at the company are not laid off, so why me? And that sense of having been judged and found wanting dovetails with older feelings of inadequacy about one's self that were acquired growing up.”
Only one group of psychiatrists that I could find had singled out the layoff, the act in which a worker is sent away, as damaging in itself to mental health. The alert had come from the 300 members of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, or more specifically from the dozen or so on the Group's Committee on Psychiatry in Industry. These were psychiatrists who worked with companies as consultants.
Their client companies engaged in layoffs and they had first-hand knowledge of what people went through. In 1982, when the modern layoff was still a raw American experience, they published a monograph entitled “Job Loss—A Psychiatric Perspective,” in which they declared: “Our experience in industry and with patients suggests that those who lose their functional role as workers may behave as if their society no longer values them. Because they accept that as true, they suffer a consequent loss in the perception of their value in their families and to themselves.”
They distributed that study, with its straightforward, unpleasant observation, and eight years later, three psychiatrists on the committee elaborated in a book, The Psychosocial Impact of Job Loss. Neither drew any attention.
Our experience in industry and with patients suggests that those who lose their functional role as workers may behave as if their society no longer values them. Because they accept that as true, they suffer a consequent loss in the perception of their value in their families and to themselves.
“Company managers were more interested in talking about the coping skills of those who remained on the job than they were about the damage to those they had laid off,” Stephen Heidel, a consultant to business and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, told me. I asked the doctors why, in their opinion, they had had so little success in publicizing the message in their monograph and book. Various possibilities were mentioned, but all seemed to agree with Heidel's observation that managers don't want to be told about damage to mental health that they inflicted as a result of a layoff that the managers initiated. “If a psychiatrist goes out and says, ‘I am an expert in job loss,’ the manager does not want to hear that and the psychiatrist won't be consulted about other services he can provide to a corporation,” Heidel said. “If you lead with that, the door will be shut. You need to put a positive spin on things.”