Unemployment, social support, and depression.

Abstract

Job loss is associated with considerable health consequences; unemployed people are affected by depression more often than employed people. The paper investigates the extent to which the connection between unemployment and depression is mediated by social support. To this end, population-wide cross-sectional data from the supplementary module «Mental Health» of the study on the health of adults in Germany (DEGS1-MH, 2008–2011) are used and depressive disorders are measured using the DSM-IV criteria of the psychiatric «Composite International Diagnostic Interview» (DIA-X/M-CIDI). The number of cases for multivariate analyses is n=2,806 between the ages of 18 and 64. Women and men who experience unemployment are roughly twice as likely to suffer from depression than employed persons who have not experience unemployment in the last five years. The explanatory share of social support in the connection between the experience of unemployment and depression is 20.8% for women (p=0.008) and 15.7% for men (p=0.140). The analyses emphasize the significance of social resources for the connection between unemployment and depression.