Survey charts depression by occupational category
Depression is a major problem in the workplace. The economic toll of depression on U.S. Companies is estimated $30 to $44 billion dollars per year in lost productivity, employee absenteeism, and low morale. As part of its annual National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) includes questions to assess lifetime and past year major depressive episode (MDE) among adults aged 18 or older. Combined data from 2004 to 2006 indicate that 7.0 percent of all full-time workers aged 18 to 64 experienced a major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year.
Depression is higher in some occupations and industry classes than others. Survey data reveals that personal care and service workers experienced rates of depression that were more than 2.5 times higher than engineers, architects, and surveyors. Here's a list of job classes and the rates of depression from the survey:
10.8% - Personal Care and Service
10.3% - Food Preparation and Serving Related
9.6% - Community and Social Services
9.6% - Healthcare Practitioners and Technical
9.1% - Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media
8.7% - Education, Training, and Library
8.1% - Office and Administrative Support
7.3% - Building and Grounds Cleaning and Maintenance
6.7% - Financial
6.7% - Sales and Related
6.4% - Legal
6.4% - Transportation and Material Moving
6.2% - Mathematical and Computer Scientists
5.9% - Production
5.8% - Management
5.6% - Farming, Fishing, and Forestry
5.5% - Protective Service
4.8% - Construction and Extraction
4.4% - Installation, Maintenance, and Repair
4.4% - Life, Physical, and Social Science
4.3% - Engineering, Architecture, and Surveyors
More detailed information about survey results can be accessed at SAMHSA's Office of Applied Studies.
Managers and supervisors should be trained to be alert for changes in job performance that may reflect common symptoms of depression. While it's not a manager's role to be a counselor, managers are in a position to refer an employee to professionals such as an EAP who can help to discover the underlying reason for the change in performance. Employers can also facilitate help for their troubled employees by making basic mental health information available through health and wellness programs. Wellness programs tend to focus on physical issues related to key health drivers, such as obesity, exercise, and smoking cessation. Issuing basic information about mental health matters, such as checklists of signs and symptoms of depression in a company newsletter, can also be very beneficial to both employees and the organization's bottom line. For a few resources that might be helpful to such educational efforts, check The Partnership for Workplace Mental Health and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
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Science Daily — Brain imaging has revealed a breakdown in normal patterns of emotional processing that impairs the ability of people with clinical depression to suppress negative emotional states. Efforts by depressed patients to suppress their feelings when viewing emotionally negative images enhanced activity in several brain areas, including the amygdala, known to play a role in generating emotion, according to a report in the August 15 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.
"Identifying areas in the nervous system that correlate to pathological mood states is one of the pressing questions in mental illness today," says Carol Tamminga, MD, of the University of Texas Southwest Medical Center. Tamminga was not involved in the study.
Tom Johnstone, PhD, of the University of Wisconsin, and colleagues there and at Tufts University studied 21 adults diagnosed with major depressive disorder and 18 healthy subjects of comparable ages. Participants were asked to view a series of emotionally positive and negative images and then indicate their reaction to each one. Four seconds after the presentation of each picture, participants were asked either to increase their emotional response (for example, imagining a loved one experiencing what was depicted in the image), to decrease it, or simply to continue watching the image.
During the test, a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner detected changes in neural activity. Johnstone and his colleagues also recorded levels of emotional excitement by measuring pupil dilation.
The data showed distinctive patterns of activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and the right prefrontal cortex (PFC), areas that regulate the emotional output generated from the amygdala. The VMPFC is compromised in depression, likely because of the inappropriate engagement of right PFC circuitry in depressed individuals.
"These findings underscore the importance of emotional regulation deficits in depression," says Johnstone. "They also suggest targets for therapeutic intervention."
According to previous research, normal interaction between the amygdala and the VMPFC may underlie the proper adaptation of levels of the stress hormone cortisol on a daily basis. These levels do not vary as widely in people with major depressive disorder; future research may now be able to clarify the mechanism that underlies this aspect of depression. It could also examine the possibility of using measurements of activity in the amygdala to predict the effectiveness of treatments for depression such as cognitive behavioral therapy.
The work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, part of the National Institutes of Health, and Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals.
Note: This story has been adapted from material provided by Society for Neuroscience.
Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com
Posted by: Fausto Intilla | October 18, 2007 7:34 AM