Depression, Anxiety, and Stress Spread Through Employee Mobility (2022)
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators. That explains why it is not more likely to happen when the individual being hired is diagnosed ("Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis"), and also why it is more likely to happen when they enter a position of power ("The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.").
I am also not sure if the social contagion model has a lot of evidence for it. If you apply epidemiological models to any data you will get fits for epidemiological model parameters, and those will have a built-in epidemiological interpretation - but without prior knowledge that mental disorders are contagious (I thought most were definitely not?) you would just be making blind nonlinear curve fits to generic functions with many possible explanations.
Simple.
The perpetrators are successful and therefore well adjusted, whereas the victims are defective and have to be excluded lest there be "social contagion".
The conclusion is its own justification.
Or, as it's fashionable nowadays, the "just world fallacy".
A tale as old as time.
Edit:
You already have a parent comment here doing exactly that.
Apparently the healthy environment was at an "hedge fund" out of all industries.
You'll notice that in the HF scenario I described, there was no perpetrators or victims. It was just a group of professionals doing work in a calm and rational, dare I say, sane, way.
So yes, I'll stick with that story as the healthiest place I've ever worked.
And in the other 3 companies I've worked, I've seen lots of examples of employees making themselves crazy en masse when the "trigger" was obviously something not worthy of that reaction.
The perpetrators and victims are all the same people.
Some time ago, I left a toxic shop to join a new company. I found myself aggressively fighting against things that I perceived as toxic based on my previous experience. Even if I was 100% correct (and I certainly wasn't), adding to the negativity wasn't helpful.
Also, your comment is talking about value judgements (talk about blame), whereas the quoted text doesn't have them — it is not saying who's the bad guy, it's just saying what will happen, statistically speaking.
That thing "the effect was most pronounced in case of a new managers". That is a manager coming in, creating toxic environment and people who are under his/her power adjusting to the situation or leaving.
I’m not a big believer in CBT, but I know for sure antidepressants, as they are used nowadays, is one massive scam.
For the record, I do support antidepressants usage to get out of very dark place initially. But they do not cure it.
We as a society need to put safety nets in place to make sure people don’t fall into those very dark places. Depression is not a virus or bacteria. It’s a socially spreading disease. But we need attitudes instead of masks to stop it. Attitudes held by both patients and surrounding people.
"Not only is there contrary evidence showing problems with reasoning are widespread as well as potentially associated with mental health rather than mental disorder. But the evidence in favour of CBT’s take on mental illness is tainted because the tests used in these studies do not even track problems with reasoning. CBT provides a compelling story about mental illness – mental illness is associated with “faulty” reasoning, and in resolving this, negative behaviour and emotions are addressed. Unfortunately, research doesn’t quite back up this story."
Call me conspiracy theorist if you want, but I smell anti-depressant makers money. Fuck overuse of anti-depressants and not paying enough attention to things that do work.
If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?
> If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?
Because therapy is more than discussion.
I think a much better analogy than surgery would be a software bootcamp. In the same sense that a classroom-oriented bootcamp is just discussion, therapy is just discussion.
There’s no replication crisis for the greater umbrella question of whether or not therapy is effective. Therapy in combination with medication is provably more effective than either alone (or nothing).
No contradiction - The problem isn't education obviously - its that some professions and disciplines are far more likely to produce pretentious ivory towers than others, that I have a problem with. Typically and ironically imo it is stronger in the soft sciences than the hard.
This isn't to say that surgery or surgeons are evil and to be avoided. Not at all. It just adds nuance to the picture: the degree of training your healthcare professional receives is only one aspect of their job, albeit an important one.
Do I care what kind of personality my surgeon has? No. I care about his aptitude at his job.
> Alcohol and drug abuse are a significant issue among physicians in general and surgeons in particular. A recent 7000-member survey of the American College of Surgeons demonstrated a prevalence for alcohol abuse among male surgeons at 13.8% and for female surgeons at 25.4%. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...
This dictionary and factoid HN comment war thread makes me want to waste karma.
Generally, though, I feel HN is a good place to cathartically vent some heat. The limits/guidelines are set such that you can be aggressive without breaking them. You can add value in an aggressive tone. It’s like a city where the drivers are aggressive. Being kind, the first comment guideline, requires respect as opposed to syrupy fake facades. MMA fighters often respect each other, for example. This attitude is acknowledging the toxicity of anonymous internet culture and making the best of it. It’s an unhealthy place, but there’s value to be made/found. Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
Jjconn’s take that therapy is useless makes me mad, and they’re willing to yell about it. I have something to gain here by learning their perspective.
Venting is okay, but weak rhetoric devices like one-sentence x doesn't work because vast blanket uninformed or intentionally reductionist statement should not get a free pass in the name of conversation. All it does is derail threads and put people who knows better in the position of managing egos while explaining what's wrong and doing it in a way that doesn't accuse the other party of just trolling or something. Or more likely they move on when they've had enough and the cycle repeats with other players.
> Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
Yeah, agreed. But it's so addictive :D !
"Avoid female surgeons" seems to be the thrust of your point here.
You're not a machine in need of a mechanic. You're a person, and people respond better when they're involved in shared decision-making regarding their healthcare.
Besides, "aptitude" is necessary but not sufficient for a surgeon. For a particularly creepy example of abuse, see https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7424662/
Further reading: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7424662/
Plenty of pretentiousness among the software crowd as well apparently.
If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case. Clearly lifestyle choices are a primary factor here but that is so taboo these days to even mention.
>If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case.
That would be true if and only if the measurements were accurate and did not change by time or location.
The measurement strategies have been changing dramatically in the past decades, and countries are almost universally in disagreement over the (significant) details. Wide variance in time and location are definitely expected, drawing a conclusion based on that is very much standing on shaky ground.
This isn’t necessarily true. There’s a wide variety of reasons for which diagnoses of mental illnesses would vary greatly. Equating Psychology to hard sciences is naive. It is the softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous.
I personally think Psychiatrists in particular have one of the most difficult jobs as physicians. It’s made worse for patients by the fact that a poorly performing Psychiatrist has many scapegoats behind which to hide.
Unfortunately I spend a lot of time around mentally ill folk, myself included. A good dose/choice of medication and a good therapist-client-match work modern miracles on people, and it’s very easy to see when you’re around it. It’s very similar to a surgery with a low success rate.
It is about as scientific as chiropractics and acupuncture, full of anecdote and very little substance, you even provided some yourself. How can you possibly trust much of anything coming out of those disciplines when the majority of papers can't even be replicated?
The purpose of my anecdote was to encourage you to see that you have no personal understanding of the subject. This is reasonable, yes? You appear to have no vested interest in someone who claims to have benefitted from therapy, and it’s very apparent you don’t see a therapist yourself.
There’s no better alternative, in terms of evidence-based approaches, for confronting mental illness. It’s irrelevant here just how good the approach is. It’s simply sick people doing the best they can to get well. From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath (I tend to think you aren’t).
I could replace therapy in that sentence with chiropractics or acupuncture and it would express an equally meaningless platitude.
> Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant.
And yet if we look at populations (as we do to benchmark real medicine) in much of the western world deaths from despair are up, depression and anxiety are up, population happiness is trending down. What a testament to those decades of research.
> From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath
This is a clear violation of HN rules, I suggest you take a look at them. What I have a problem with is people being duped into spending tons of money by charlatans. People in need spend money on tons of things they are convinced help them (supplements, psychics, acupuncture etc), that isn't evidence of their utility.
Sorry. Also, it’s not directed at you but rather someone who would deny another what they knew to be good medicine. It would be valid, in that case, would it not? (Still against the rules, I guess. I wouldn’t mind being banned for accurately labeling a sociopath; that would be a decent signal to spend my time elsewhere.)
You actually believe therapy to be a complete farce, which I hadn’t comprehended before this point.
Read some systematic literature review abstracts. Parse some statistics. Ask a physician you trust to explain it to you.
Research doesn’t suggest that therapy improves the lives of everyone but rather that it’s effective treatment for disease. You could similarly find papers that say the same thing about acupuncture or chiropractors: when I say “research” here, I’m referring to many orders of magnitudes more psychology papers. Tens of thousands would pass your replication crisis criticism criteria.
Storytelling is just discussion but that doesn’t mean stories don’t exist, or that all stories are the same, that everyone is an equally good story teller, etc.
If I go in a company and others are receptive to my anxiety, then it means anxiety is rampant in that company.
In my country burn out and alikes are increasing very rapidly (like 3x in 10 years). So I believe that the articles says that when your are tired, you're more likely to catch the flu. It's not the flu that is strong, it's the other's that more fragile.
And as someone who got through the burnout big time, I can assure you that this article will be misread. HR depts I have seen have a long way to go before they understand that burn out damages should be put on shoulders on the employee as well as the employer.
I am specifically referring to therapy as distinct of psychiatry (which uses meds)
More broadly though, the conversation you can have with a therapist has a lot more going on than a regular discussion. Without getting into the details of every school I think it's fair to say that these conversations are guided in subtle and not subtle ways to lead the patient to introspection and self-reflection much more than a drink between buddies at a bar would (which is usually what people on HN tend argue when criticizing talk therapies). Therapists have to assess where the patient stands and feel how far the patient can be pushed to change their outlook on a situation or accept it.
Put in another way: a debate is also more than a discussion, same applies to therapy.
To your point at the end: the dictionary on iOS defines discussion as “a conversation or debate about a certain topic”
I can certainly agree that therapy is a guided discussion :)
The communication modality of therapy is voice. Why do you have to ask that here?
Because I like to ask questions to improve my understanding of the world when I notice someone seems to know something I don’t. Almost like we’re discussing things on a discussion forum.
I was frustrated by the naivety of your question in that it implies many folks have no idea what therapy is (and often take a negative attitude, which you’re not doing) and I took it out on you. Sorry.
A few of my family members struggle with depression and also with anxiety. I love them dearly, but spending too much time with them can ruin my mood. It is exhausting to try to be upbeat around someone who is depressed; in my experience, they win, and I am dragged into sadness as well. Similarly, it is stressful to be around someone who suffers from anxiety.
It is widely accepted that mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are positive feedback loops. I don’t know why the same traits that make them so would not be able to impact others.
Just spend the morning on Reddit (or even HN!) and notice how your entire outlook changes.
There really needs to be a close proximity to the source; this means that online content isn’t really going to spread it. You need to be physically located in the environment near the people with depression and anxiety.
Also, you have to be easily socially suggestible and open to the input of others, on the level of mirroring and the chameleon effect.
Example: I worked for a boss with depression and anxiety. It never rubbed off on me, but his wife was highly suggestible and she seemed to mirror his foibles and idiosyncrasies.
I don’t know if I would go as far as the conclusions of the Rat Park experiment, but there is something to be said for a healthy, safe, and nurturing environment.
For approximately 10% of the population, who are considered highly suggestible. For comparison, Fox News had 1.21 percent of the US population as a primetime audience in 2020. One can imagine how that number increases with shared environments of family, friends, peers, and work (in other words, networks).
My mother is a great example. She won’t take tech advice from anyone in our family, but if one of her close friends shares that same information with her, it somehow becomes history—signed, sealed, and delivered. She’s influenced by her peers in a highly suggestible way.
Don’t know what the Twitter numbers are. In the 1960s, Huxley speculated that suggestibility was as high as 20%, and argued that if you controlled 20% of the population, you controlled the whole of society. More recently, that number has come down to 15%. My point remains the same as before.
Of course, I am not implying that people with depression are stupid.
Also , I like to think it isn't the attitude that is spreading but that depressed people help set an environment that cultivates depression whether by stress, lack of communication, bad communication,etc... depression wouldn't exactly be the first disease to be caused or affected by the environment a person spends their time in.
If you are, to some degree, predisposed to depression, you are more likely to aggravate or trigger it by living in an hostile environment than if you are living your dream life.
It's like being predisposed to cardiovascular diseases : even if you are predisposed, you are more likely to not have any issue if you never encounter stress, eat healthy and have an active life.
Saying depression can be contagious by no means implies that depression is an attitude and not a disease.
But for stress - if you were leaving a job because you found it too stressful, wouldn't you be eager to chill out and take things easy at your new job?
If there is “evidence for the social contagion model”, this kind of analysis would be a natural step in developing hypotheses about where and how to look for it. And if there’s none to be found, those hypotheses will eventually fail to hold. That’s the method.
If you choose not to collect data or test hypotheses because you think a question is “most definitely” settled, then you’re not practicing science.
You may be saving wasted effort or managing some kind of socio-political dynamic, which may be more important to you, but some people appreciate science specifically for its ability to upend “most definite” knowledge now and then.
Really strong disagree. In every company I've worked at (4 so far) the level of mental illness I can observe among coworkers is directly related to who was hired, not what we do with them.
As an obvious example, I worked at a hedge fund that strongly filtered for resilience, ability to overcome obstacles, and desire to grow through tough feedback. Almost everyone I worked with there was rational, calm, and sane as a consequence.
At other places where mental attributes weren't considered (so let's say a pure tech interview that doesn't amp up the scenario) you could watch the "crazy" come out of the woodwork there moment something triggered it. And I think specifically you could see them feeding on each other's anxiety in the Slack hangouts, blind, etc.
At some point, seeing 400 people have a meltdown about the layoffs that happened, on daily basis for months, takes a toll on you that's worse than the impact of the layoff itself. So yes I see the chorus of crazies impact everyone negatively.
At the end of that interview I wasn't sure if I should call social services or not. It was pretty deeply unsettling for me.
But I think that's orthogonal to whether hiring crazy people makes other people in your company crazier.
Is it really too surprising people with a less cozy backup fund are anxious when the person next to them lost their livelihood in an instant, especially in this macroeconomic environment where getting hired again is far from certain?
I'm just saying, if losing your job hits the "safety" level of your pyramid of needs, is the looming threat really so unreasonable to be anxious about?
The amount of anxiety was not proportional to these facts.
I think that part of it is that certain policies, procedures, techniques, etc are more likely to exasperate mental health issues than others. If someone is coming from a disfunctional organization they might introduce some of those behaviors to the team, even at a lower level. I worked with an ex faang employee that complained about the stressful culture, while advocating for the policies and tech of that culture.
1) It is entirely possible that a subset of this population organically "grew" this mentality as a result of their previous work environment. I'll admit that early in my career I in fact may have been such a person-- I came from a confrontational environment filled with vicious shouting matches complete with the most vile language you might think of. That was very much not my personality but when I moved on, though I knew that extreme was not usual, it took me a little bit to realize that even a very mild version of it wasn't the norm. (I was also massively, clinically depressed)And given my personality, I was probably a little more shy, withdrawn, that sort of thing. I can easily imagine another person emulating behavior from an awful environment that they grew to think of as the norm. And it was a positive work environment that helped me through, and become a productive group member (professionally. the depression still sucked)
2) Someone with a clinical mental disorder really shouldn't be labelled a a perpetrator. The connotation there is one of deliberate intent. And the fact that such things may go undiagnosed in the clinical sense should also be considered.
None of this is intended to dispute the findings of this article. Though it's an observational study rather than one with an intervention of some sort, so a bit of caution is probably prudent, but it's also a large scale study which helps in that area.
But sure, the study may even be accurate for clinical/pre-clinical people but that doesn't make them perpetrators. They should be treated as people who may simply need a little more mentorship or collegiality in order to find their place in the organization. (or encouraged to seek clinical help if that seems in order)
Now, these same people may be themselves victims of others doing the same, or they may suffer from their own mental issues, or they may be just be ruthless. But either way, the alternate hypothesis was that hiring this kind of people is more likely to be the cause of the observed effect, rather than any idea of "social contagion".
Only if you're importing their managers.
Managers focused on MBA crap are bad enough for corporate culture, but those raised in corporate fiefdoms are even worse. When half of their time is wasted on fighting petty fights with other managers instead of working together with them, they waste the time of those below them as well.
Other examples would be fear of altering any deeper parts of the system due to fear of punishment or war room style crisis.
Touching production is a lot like being an electrician working on a live circuit.
- an employee avoids sharing key technical information with colleagues, either verbally or writing anything down, and becomes a bottleneck for all changes relating to some system or component. this could be adapted to maximise tenure at a previous org that had decided to outsource/"offshore" technical roles, where sharing key knowledge would result in you being promptly laid off
- an employee demonstrates an extreme reluctance to estimate when any task they are involved with might be done. this could be adapted to survive in environments where estimates from individuals are interpreted politically as commitments to deadlines for unconditional delivery of work, and used to pressure workers to extract free labor (unpaid overtime)
- an employee never communicates bad news about schedule delays, plans not being feasible, designs having serious flaws, etc. this could be adapted to prior environments where voicing bad news triggers retribution, and only good news flows up the org chart
Ah, there are so many reasons for this. I won't give a deadline when I anticipate the requirements will change. Experienced workers can look at a planned implementation and tell management 'This isn't going to work, we're going to have to change this' and be handwaved away, because they know inevitably, after management has played out whatever fabricated 'negotiation' they've set up for themselves, inevitably the requirements will change and a new deadline will need to be established.
I started my career in a software agency, maybe I was unlucky, but in this particular agency I overheard the more senior employees staying after-hours and making fun of the the junior employees (in their absence) and the quality of the code they had wrote. There was no actual code review process but this memory had made me very defensive in regards to my code. I was always trying to push the perfect code in one shot, which led me to overthink solution, and if for whatever reason I had to push a rushed change I felt guilty and tried to find excuses preemptively.
At one time I had to onboard the client's new dev team to a project that I had built alone for about one year. The product had become successful so the client wanted to invest in rebuilding it on better foundations to prepare for accelerating its growth.
Working alone on the code for a year had subdued my fears of public shaming but, once I started going through it with a team of seniors looking over my shoulder, my anxiety went through the roof. For every new file I was opening I started my explanation with an apology about the quality of the code and tried to explain why I didn't have the time during implementation to write that code properly.
After the 2nd or 3rd explanation one of the new guys stopped me and said something like: "You don't have to explain yourself to us. This code is the result of the context it has been written in. We are only having this conversation because the product that you helped build by writing that code is successful. Because of this success we now have the chance to spend time and think about how we can improve the code".
I only realized later, but that was one of the most liberating things anyone has ever told me. It felt like a huge weight had just been lifted of my shoulders. People were looking at my code and discussing it not as a reflection of my quality as a person but as the output of different factors and priorities at a given point in time.
I worked with that team long enough to feel deconditioned from the previous toxic behavior.
Beautiful!
So many companies are cesspools of mental trauma that are very inviting places for the unaware, and if you’re not strong of mind you get to subconsciously carry their issues with you for a long time after.
Work become easier. No stress and much less unpaid overtime.
Workplace culture influences people a lot.
As a manager there is no way I'm contaminating my team with Amazon's culture. And yeah yeah "not all former Amazon blabla". Sure, I dont have time to play the odds. We all know about Amazon's toxic culture.
What we need is actual action politically.
If it was raw exposure to stressed/anxious people that was the issue, you wouldn't expect this. They're probably just measuring problem people moving between organizations. Someone had to make the unhealthy organization unhealthy in the first place, and that person was probably a manager or long time employee.
This sounds sort of like victim blaming to me. I've worked in a couple of bad environments and felt outright relief when I was able to go somewhere much better.
The answer is to do away with toxic work environments, not blame the person who suffered under them.
Your analogy is completely missing the entire point made in the paper, which is that an epidemic model applies in this case.
Just the other week, I was talking with a colleague who was in a depressing and stressful work situation, at another company where I've never been.
Hours later, I had an interview (elsewhere), and my brain was in a cautious-of-problems mode, and not the more appropriate excited-about-new-possibilities mode.
Afterwards, I realized it was reflected in questions I asked, voice tone, etc., and then realized why. :)
As the raw number of humans with some applicable skills increase world wide, and the disconnect between pre-funded wealthy environments and others increases, new invisible "flags" likely can be applied.
Not to defend the way business is done in China, but I have heard that when they assembled teams for an important new company, they often did not do as the West has done and cast infinitely large hiring nets with infinitely more nuanced and rare characteristics, rather in China the rumor is that they just used who they could find with a reasonable search, and got on with it..
Lastly, it is ironic that the divisive, command and control environments found in long-term stable business, are actually very negative to creative and open-minded people who want to try things.. Yet these "rules" might favor those in the stable business world, bringing all the anti-communication and top-down culture from there. odd times
Wouldn’t the mental health reflect the organization and its communication style?
Screening and monitoring: watching new hires to see if they exhibit toxic or negative behaviours
Treatment: Help employees to get better treatment, both for personal issues, but also for negative learnt behaviours.
It reads like Denmark has linked employment and health data so I guess they can do so for as far back as the records go.
What is the cause of the unhealthy behavior in the first place? As opposed to social contagion, what is the origin?
"The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position" is a huge concern if the new manager has sociopathic tendencies.
I haven’t read this paper yet, but it looks pretty cool so far. The abstract certainly makes it seem worth the read.
We seem to think ourselves as further removed from meatspace than we really are. We’re a lot more like colonies of ants, I think. What attacks the ant, attacks the colony.
how do you explain the same phenomenon occurring in remote workplaces?
I agree there's a biological aspect to it. But it's clearly "contagious" over the internet and thus by human communication, not germs.
I was thinking primarily about people who work indoors, in rooms with poor circulation. I’d wager those people are sicker more often, unwell more often, and obese more often. That’s all I meant.