Worst jobs most depressing

I'm so glad there's a study about this that I could just bip, because it was long overdue!

A new report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration ranks occupations based on the rate of clinical depression - and effectively indicts the new economy's reliance on low-paying service jobs.

If I'd heard about this study without seeing the results, I'd have honestly guessed that food service jobs - you know, the jobs people who only have 3½ years of college are now expected to take (even though they would have gotten a much better job 15 years ago) - would have some of the worst depression rates. I'd guess that civil engineers and architects would have the lowest rates. Rates for folks such as myself - writers and other creators of art - would be slightly higher than average, while rates for people in factory and similar blue-collar jobs that have had relatively good benefits and organization (in America at least) would be lower than average.

My guesses would have turned out to be pretty much dead-on.

The category of "engineering, architecture, and surveyors" had the lowest rate of depression. But folks in "food preparation and serving related" jobs had a depression rate over twice that of engineers, surveyors, and architects - a rate surpassed only by those who tend to "personal care and service." Installers, repairers, and truck drivers seem to fare pretty well. Farmers don't have too much depression, probably because they're allowed to get sunlight. People in "arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media" fare worse than average - but not as badly as those in the health care field that takes up so much of the modern American economy.

In short, the fields that are growing the fastest tend to have the worst rates of depression - not to mention lower pay and fewer benefits.

In today's America, with the service sector dominant, getting a job could mean destroying your own health, unless you're among the few who have a degree (a process that itself usually costs money). While depression rates for the jobless are slightly higher than for the employed, much of that is probably accounted for by all the people who had good jobs but lost their jobs to the new economy and know things won't be better if they take the bad jobs that exist now. Who wants to be a victim of downward mobility? It runs against the grain of everything America is supposed to stand for.

Many of today's problems began in the '90s when Nazis in Congress yanked the security net out from under American workers. They wouldn't raise wages (despite inflation), they cut benefits, and they slashed (sorry, "streamlined") workforces. Then they blamed it all on the workers.

I think that if a college-educated factory worker loses their job and can't find any employment except making minimum wage at Booger Burger, and lives in a region with a high cost of living, and knows they're going to hate the burger job, they should be allowed to get a government benefit until they can find a job that's somewhere approaching the one they lost. Just think of it as being paid for by the highest-income taxpayers, who control the purse strings anyway and made the decisions that cost the worker their original job. These well-paid executives could just make things simpler by not costing workers their jobs, thereby not having the IRS and the Treasury act as middlepersons.

Forcing someone to take a job that they'll utterly loathe and which is inadequate anyway is almost exactly the same as the old Soviet practice of telling people what jobs they had to take. Honestly, what's the difference? If there is a difference, the current American practice is actually worse, because with the old Soviet setup there was at least a chance that someone might have made a living wage.

As things stand now, depression actually costs $30,000,000,000 to $44,000,000,000 in lost productivity annually in the U.S. - so by not guaranteeing better jobs, the system is really hurting itself in the long run.

What do the high-income Bushbots at Freak Rethuglic say about all of this? One wealthy commenter boasted, "I am not employed and am as happy as the proverbial lark." Lovely. Freepers are rich enough that they don't have to work and can gloat about it - yet they attack working-class people who are unemployed because of forces they had no control over. And the Freepers wonder why we don't kiss their asses.

(Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071013/ap_on_go_ot/depressing_jobs;
http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k7/depression/occupation.htm)