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What some commentators refer to as the "Great Recession" of 2008 resulted in severe job losses across Europe and the US. And researchers know from previous evidence that job loss among workers is associated with increased depression, substance use and poorer health.
As the researchers behind the new study consider unemployment benefit programs to be less comprehensive than those offered by their European counterparts, they theorized that American workers are potentially more susceptible to depression due to income loss.
The researchers tested this hypothesis in the first study to compare how associations of unemployment and depression differ across different countries. They drew data from the Health and Retirement Survey and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe during 2004-2010, which looked at 38,356 participants in total.
Overall, the researchers found that job loss was associated with a 4.8% increase in depression scores in the US and a 3.4% increase in Europe.
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