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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.

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.

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// 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

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.

And then there are psychopathic workplaces where management hires anxious and vulnerable employees in order to maintain their own sense of dominance over those who work for them. I talked with a managerial candidate once who considered this a "good strategy" because "you can make them work 80 hrs a week and they won't complain".

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.

One can make a good case that in the long run everyone is better off with workers rights. The bullying that is so prevalent in the US workplace is deeply unhealthy and at the end of the day, damaging to productivity.

That sounds horrible. And very likely not totally uncommon.

But I think that's orthogonal to whether hiring crazy people makes other people in your company crazier.

True, was responding to the comment more than the article. That "morale" is contagious does not seem to me to be a particularly surprising finding. Nor that a person's mental health can affect their working relationship with someone and that person's mental health. Anyone who has lead groups of people gets an intuitive sense of that pretty quickly. And I think the author is trying to put that intuition on a more reasoned footing, which I think is a good effort, but mental health is rather hard to measure quantitatively so it resists this form of analysis pretty strongly.

Well a slave needs a slave driver, there's a place for everything

I don't want to assume too much, but may I ask how well set up your safety net is in case you get fired? I'd assume that hedge fund managers are pretty well set up, and they don't have to be too concerned about losing their jobs.

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?

Good clarification. In all cases the people I worked with were highly paid tech workers facing a great job market. The objective reality was "you'll be fine and you'll find a job quickly"

The amount of anxiety was not proportional to these facts.

Is it unreasonable to suspect that depressed people can spread their attitudes to other people? The concept of purely social diseases is centuries old at this point.

Yes it is unreasonable, because depression is not an “attitude”.

Same question but without the DSM-5 diagnosis? I do recognize that work cultures differ and that people after a few years internalize the work culture. Some firms have massively worse performance on absence, sickness and probably all other kinds of metrics related to well being. So my prior would be one of “totally true”. But keeping an open mind. The same set of observations could fit other explanations like that extraverts with people skills switch jobs more often and that there is clustering of likewise individuals on certain negative traits.

Clinical depression is not an attitude. But in vast majority of cases some attitudes was the cause.

So we should help identify and fix attitudes, instead of "anti-depressing" them with medication -- sounds plausible.

Yes. Anti-depressants is just to give the initial lift out of a very dark place. They won’t cure anything.

This is not true. The cognitive model of depression has been debunked: https://theconversation.com/cbt-is-wrong-in-how-it-understan...

You’re wrong. Your own article says that CBT does work.

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.

Did you even read the article? CBT and the cognitive model are not the same thing. CBT (the therapy) works, but that doesn't mean the underlying theory is correct.

"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."

Yes, I did read. It's funny when something works, literally saving lives, but is called „unethical“ because somebody can't figure out a synthetic test.

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.

Clearly it's possible for depression to be affected by discussion with people around you.

If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?

> Clearly it's possible for depression to be affected by discussion with people around you.

> If that were not possible, then how could therapy have an effect?

Because therapy is more than discussion.

I mean it 100% is ultimately discussion no matter how much one wants to shroud it in academic ivory tower BS.

If we reduce it to an incredibly basic form, sure, in the same way that surgery is just ultimately stabbing with medical ivory tower BS.

If my surgeon had as much education as the average therapist does and surgery science had the replication crisis that therapy does I would call it exactly that: stabbing with medical ivory tower bs… thankfully that isn’t quite the case

You’ve both labeled therapy as an ivory tower and implied therapists don’t have much education; that’s somewhat of a contradiction. What’s your purpose here?

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).

> You’ve both labeled therapy as an ivory tower and implied therapists don’t have much education; that’s somewhat of a contradiction.

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.

Since you mention surgery as some sort of high-value comparator, surgical training favours people with some unpleasant personality traits [0] (apparently due to the stressful nature of the work), while surgery itself is a very powerful placebo [1].

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.

[0] https://doi.org/10.1308/rcsbull.2015.331

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6693073/

> surgical training favours people with some unpleasant personality traits

Do I care what kind of personality my surgeon has? No. I care about his aptitude at his job.

Let's hope your surgeon personality doesn't help them too much with hiding their drug abuse problem if they have one then and that you are not the one going under the scalpel when they first start to lose it.

> 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.

If you feel like diving, I literally got a response from dang a few days ago after absolutely losing my shit in another thread. In that case, the results for myself were not positive, and I regret my actions. At least it was a first offense and I didn’t get banned.

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.

> 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.

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 !

>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%

"Avoid female surgeons" seems to be the thrust of your point here.

You missed the point and managed to illustrate it.

Why do you think they're separable? Personality informs decisions and care.

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/

> [..] 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.

Plenty of pretentiousness among the software crowd as well apparently.

No, therapy usually involves lots of homework as well. The talking part of it is essential to get there, but if you just go to therapy to talk it won't help much.

What makes you want to apply reductionism at level 100%. A discussion might help.

Because I think it is absurd and frankly ascientific how hard people cling to the idea that depression and anxiety are some biological or chemical body problem that is entirely outside their control. That it requires drugs or “special therapy techniques” to improve (Quite a useful narrative if your trying to sell those though)

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.

While explicitly not trying to take a side:

>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.

> If that we’re the case

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.

> softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous

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?

Simple:because, unlike chiropractic and acupuncture, some papers can be replicated.

As myself and others have pointed out, there is plenty of hard evidence that therapy is effective. Unfortunately it isn’t as optimistic as, say, cataracts surgery. Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant. (Admittedly, it doesn’t help my case that only the recent decades are particularly valuable.)

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).

> 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.

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.

> clear violation of HN rules

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.

You really should take that chip on your shoulder to a therapist or a surgeon rather than on HN though. Acid comments won't help people consider your point of view if exposed with such aggression.

What do you mean? Talk therapy makes the assumption that depression/anxiety is not solely biological/chemical, and that the therapy will in some way alter the patient's mindset, lifestyle choices, environment, etc.

This is similar to saying a hiring interview is only discussion, and any acknowledgment of employee skills or hiring techniques is just bs managerial posturing.

Which it is. The idea that you can accurately gauge a person's skills during an interview is complete bullshit. And at the end of the day an interview is just a discussion, people are hired based on how they make the interviewer feel and it will be months before they discover if they are qualified or not.

You can’t gauge them accurately in an interview, that doesn’t mean the skills themselves don’t exist.

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.

Pretty sure the vast majority of therapists have left the academic ivory tower and build their practice on years of secular experience but okay.

I think it does depressed people a disservice to refuse to accept the possibility that depression might be contagious, in order to protect them from being demeaned.

Yes. There's a reason there are support groups for people (spouses etc) who are close to people with chronic depression and other mental illnesses. Because it has an impact of the people around a person afflicted with these illnesses.

If A has hard time supporting/coping with B's anxiety, the it means that A has already too much anxiety.

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.

Genuine question: how is therapy more than discussion? Afaik therapists use nothing but words to effect their treatment.

I am specifically referring to therapy as distinct of psychiatry (which uses meds)

Therapy is only as good as the therapist, and it's difficult to gauge if a therapist will be any good for one particular person. Getting the right therapist is critical for therapy to 'work'. Same applies for meds. But generally, it's about helping a person help themselves.

I'd amend that to "only as good as the client-therapist fit." A good therapist for you might be terrible for me. Which is why it's so damned hard to find a good therapist. It takes a few sessions to even figure out if this person is going to help. Several months and thousands of dollars later, you might get to start on the work.

Agreed.

Look into CBT, which would usually give the patient some tasks (jotting notes when the problem they seek help for happens and how problematic/stressful it is on a 1-5 scale, what happens when they apply some breathing techniques to cope with it, what happened before/after, etc.). Also, phobia treatment where the therapist can walk with you on a bridge to help you overcome fear of height, etc.

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.

Got it. Sounds like the distinction hinges on how one defines “discussion”

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 :)

Obviously the only thing that typically happens in a therapist’s office is talking and note-taking. That’s no different than plenty of business meetings. If you want to label those business meetings as just “discussion” you wouldn’t be wrong, but they’re also business meetings.

The communication modality of therapy is voice. Why do you have to ask that here?

> 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.

Lol, I came back to remove said snarky remark before you saw it, but you beat me to the punch.

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.

Most types of therapy, especially talk therapy, tends to make depression worse. The only two with any evidence supporting them are CBT and IBT [https://www.apa.org/topics/depression/overcoming].

Most human behaviors are contagious to some extent - depression, obesity, definitely anorexia, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transference

Sure, but it has triggers. What if those actions act as a trigger for other pre-disposed people?

depressed people does not mean clinical depression

Call depression what you want, but I don’t agree that it is not contagious, along with some other mental illnesses (e.g. anxiety). They’re not “contagious” in the sense that you will receive a clinical diagnosis for depression immediately after being around someone depressed, but I think it is naive to think others are not impacted by their interactions with depressed people.

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.

You don't even need to have mentally ill family members to see how contagious depression and anxiety can be.

Just spend the morning on Reddit (or even HN!) and notice how your entire outlook changes.

Environment and suggestibility could explain the contagion hypothesis.

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.

I remember seeing experiments that Facebook had done around changing someone's feed to have more depressing content and concluding that it was possible to change someone's mood by that. Online content definitely impacts mental health, you can see how the outlook of people who are always on Twitter or Foxnews changes.

> it was possible to change someone's mood by that. Online content definitely impacts mental health

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.

If only there was a way to inoculate oneself...

You are addressing the effect rather than the cause: Simply removing an anxious person from the workplace won't solve the underlying reasons why that person became anxious or depressed at work in the first place. If you went on a crusade and fired all of the anxious workers, do you contend that will stop the 'spread' of anxiousness among your employees? I certainly don't think so.

Reminds me of a somewhat related proverb: "Never argue with idiots. They will drag you down to their level, and then win through experience."

Of course, I am not implying that people with depression are stupid.

Yes but an attitude adjustment can affect not just that but other well established and chronic diseases. People can literally attiude themselves to death, you can focus your mind enough with a death wishing attitude and you would just die, doctors will tell you that a patient with a good attitude stands a better chance at fighting any disease than a patient with a bad attitude. Your attitude is set in your brain which regulates different chemicals and hormones. When you see an attractive person you get chemicals to make your body react, when your brain thinks it's in danger you get adrenaline,etc... is it so unreasonable for depression to be at least helped or harmed (not caused) by pursuing a good attitude?

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 depression can be caused (in at least some cases) by external factors like their environments (which is well supported), and people’s attitudes impact other people’s environments, then guess what - it can be contagious.

Chemical imbalance theory is looking to be bullshit actually.

I'm curious about this. Do you have some sources you could share? Would like to learn more about this

Well, you are right that depression is not an attitude. It's a disease, a malfunction. But like any other disease, it can happen from or be aggravated by external factors.

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.

While you and I know that, literally up and down this thread are dozens of commenters who do not, and seem to think it is indeed just an “attitude”. Or that being sad is the same as being depressed.

Yes. If it were true then psychologists and psychiatrists would be the most depressed people anywhere.

Nurses and Doctors wear extensive PPE around known-infectious patients. A huge part of psychiatric care is composing your "mental PPE" to remain objective, and maintain their distance from the patient.

You have a different relationship with depressed clients than depressed coworkers and mangers.

the power dynamic is way different, indeed

I think they are? This article says like half (compared to 10% of US adults?) https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/campus-confidential-...

A lot of people predisposed to mental illness gravitate to the profession.

For depression, perhaps. Misery loves company.

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?

Maybe they're like those people you meet that "hate drama" yet it somehow follows them around every turn.

It's similar to domestic violence or unhealthy relationships - many sufferers of that are so used to being treated badly they literally cannot imagine a better world and can't spot red flags.

This assumes stress always comes from an external source. Most of the stressed-oout people I know actually have anxiety as a personality trait, and stress as a result of it.

A lot of people create their own stress and are their own worst enemies - you know the type, we all do - when they switch jobs, they don't switch personalities.

Yes, I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces. Someone who is leaving Blizzard because of a scandal where their assaulting other co workers became public is extremely different from someone leaving Blizzard because their manager assaulted them.

> I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces.

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.

I assume your hedge fund comment is a reference to my post, so I'll reply.

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.

If you came up in a toxic environment that will be all that you know. Good people will come out of certain shops thinking that e.g. firing the bottom % of employees is just something you do and tank all their projects.

The perpetrators and victims are all the same people.

I think I agree with this, but there are also other causes.

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.

You have an implicit assumption that people in toxic organizations are split into two binary categories of perpetrators and victims. In my experience, in toxic orgs everybody thinks of themselves as victims, and everybody perpetuates toxic behaviors to some extent.

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.

In fact, this behavior of splitting everyone into perpetrators and victims is a toxic behavior.

I have explicitly seen twice now a manager to come in and make everything toxic purely by herself being toxic. And I have seen a leader to create non-toxic environment. The fact is, managers sets the tone. And when the culture is toxic, the rot comes from the head. Individuals on lower levels can be toxic too, but that spills on others only when management fails.

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 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.

For exasperate, I think you meant exacerbate.

Though to be fair, the authors argue that in consequence, companies should actively on-board employees to reduce anxiety from uncertainty and unknown expectations.

Hmm, I wonder why that wasn't the headline?

Because you can't fit a whole paper in a headline.

> but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators.

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.

It also sounds like it’s a bad thing. But one of the standard plays for startup executives is to deliberately create an influx of people and culture from Amazon, in order to inject fear and grind into an organization they see as too fat and happy. Not only do they believe this effect exists, they lean into it.

I don't think it's correct or accurate to characterize people who are dejected (among more severe things) as perpetrators, as though they were already negative personalities, or "no" people, or some other form of inconducive to a positive work environment:

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)

When the GP was talking about perpetrators, they meant "people who induce depression and anxiety in others". In the context of workplace-associated depression and anxiety, there are people whose management styles cause these problems. People who put undue pressure on others, who demean and berate etc.

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".

I don’t think you realize how anti-scientific an attitude you’re expressing here.

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.

Which part was anti-scientific, offering an alternate hypothesis, or questioning the applicability of the methodology?

How is it blaming the victims? The initial depressed person that "spreads" their depression to three other people around them is as much a victim as anyone else.

I don't know whether your model is accurate, but it's plausible enough that the paper should address it.

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