Working excessive hours has long been thought to increase the risk of depression – but after conducting the largest ever review of research into this area, researchers say there is a surprising lack of evidence in support of the link.
An analysis by the World Health Organization (WHO) and International Labour Organization (ILO) is now challenging previous research findings and general public opinion that working long hours can be a trigger for depression.
The systematic review and meta-analysis drew from 22 studies with more than 100,000 participants (all predating the coronavirus pandemic), which had all found a link between working long hours and the onset of depression. The team concluded that these studies fell short of establishing overwork as a trigger.
Advertisement
By contrast, another by the WHO and ILO found strong evidence for a link between working 55-plus hours a week, and the risk of ischaemic heart disease or stroke.
Frank Pega at the WHO says the same association couldn’t be found for the effect of long hours on depression, reflecting “major limitations” of the existing research.
“Despite being relatively large in size, we found that this body of evidence still provides only inadequate evidence for harmfulness,” says Pega. “In other words, it is still not clear whether working long hours triggers depression or not.”
Future studies could be improved with more robust, longer-term data collection and epidemiological analysis, including of at-risk populations, so as to better establish causation. Natural experiments looking at changes in working hours for occupations where long hours are standard, could also be promising, he says.
The problems of work-related stress, depression and anxiety need addressing. For example, a recent UK labour force survey that 18 million workdays were lost in 2019 as a result, and the coronavirus pandemic is likely to have exacerbated the issue.
But identifying a causal link between work and depression is challenging when non-work factors also play a role, and the lines between work and free time are increasingly blurred.
at the University of Westminster, UK, and at the University of Sydney, Australia, say that looking only at depression and hours worked was a “potentially misleading” representation of work’s toll on mental health.
“It is not necessarily that long work is not bad for us mentally, but that it is hard to know exactly in what ways it is bad for us,” say Ridge and Broom.
Asking people about more specific problems, such as work satisfaction or burnout, may be a more relevant way to measure work’s impact on mental health than depression, say the pair.
Time spent working also doesn’t account for the broader political and economic context of work. “Working for many hours in the [economic boom of the] 1980s, when there was much hope for one’s career advancement and for a brighter future in society, did not bring the kind of stress that it does today,” says at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.
“It is when all the labour and effort seems futile, when there’s so much uncertainty in society, when there’s a widespread sense of inequality that the long hours begin to take a psychological toll,” she says.
In Japan, where employers can be found responsible and sanctioned for employees’ work-related depression or death by suicide, there is an increasing push to recognise the “quantitative and qualitative” aspects of stress alongside the hours of overtime worked, she says.
Environment International
Need a listening ear? :Ěý116123;Ěý: 1 800 273 8255;Â
Sign up to our free Health Check newsletter for a round-up of all the health and fitness news you need to know, every Saturday
