There are many depressive jobs like : personal care, food service, social workers, and healthcare workers, these jobs are considered as the highest depression rates jobs as the studies has proved that these jobs participate in the psychological pain of their workers to a far extent, for example, the scientists find that the rate of the depression caused by the job of personal care is 10,8%.
According to the National Institute for Mental Health almost 7% of the U.S. adult population will experience major depressive disorder within the course of the year.
Job Stress
We can define Job Stress as the harmful physical and psychological response when the requirement of the job does not match with the need, capability, or resource of the employee, thus we can say that the jobs of those qualities are stressing jobs, those stressing jobs may lead to depression as in the case of the worker of personal care, we notice that he /she encounter many difficulties in dealing with people everyday specially the old people, as they require a complete care from the worker, and they also require a patient worker to stand them and to can fulfill their endless requirements, the workers of caring with children also suffer from the burdens linked to the wide responsibility related to young children as the workers should take care of the children when their mothers are outside, the workers have to cook food for them, they also have to follow them, they have to help those children with their homework, in addition we find that the workers have to choose the clothes of the children and they change diapers to those children, this job does not give satisfaction to the result as a result to that stress caused by all of those depressing jobs, the health of the workers decreases and they may encounter accidents because the level of their attention is affected negatively due to the great effort they do with the children, the stress of the job of healthcare worker is caused because of the burdens on the worker as that worker should be so attentive of the ill people he is responsible for, to stick to the time of having medicine for example and so on, therefore we find the statistics report that the level of depression related to the job of healthcare worker is about 9,6 % due to the stress of practicing that hard job.
Social workers are concerned with solving individual and personal problems in addition they care about broader social issues like poverty, unemployment, helping individuals or families in enhancing their collective and individual well-being in order to teach them how to get ends to their problems, so this job require a great effort to fulfill it correctly, because the nature of people controls the level of stress of this job. The level of depression linked to social workers reach 9,6 %. The job of food service is very stressful one, as the level of depression linked to it reach 10,3% as the worker of food service should do his best to satisfy the customers of the quality of food , the speed of presenting the meals, and the level of the restaurant’s cleanness, so we can consider that the job of food service is one of the most stressful jobs.
Job Burnout
Burnout can be defined simply as a state of physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion caused by the great stress of the work. Job Burnout is defined also by Jackson and Maslach as a syndrome of emotional cynicism and exhaustion that occurs frequently among people who do (people –work)
Job burnout occur in the cases of the jobs we mentioned before ( food service –personal care – healthcare – social work ) these jobs don’t support the worker by the feeling of self-efficacy of self –worth, for example the job of healthcare, although it doesn’t require a great pain in doing it. it can not carry positive emotion of self efficacy to the worker , the worker doesn’t get satisfaction from working as health care responsible , these negative and harmful emotions can lead to the state of exhaustion from the physical , mental , or emotional side , which called ‘ Job Burnout’ Dr. Ballard said that “A lot of burnout really has to do with experiencing chronic stress,” Dr. Ballard, is the head of the APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace Program. “In those situations, the demands being placed on you exceed the resources you have available to deal with the stressors.”
Left unchecked, burnout can wreak havoc on your health, happiness, relationships and performance of work in general . In order to catch burnout and combat it early, it’s important to know what the signs of Burnout are
There are some signs of having Job Burnout like:
- To be emotionally, physically, or mentally exhausted all the time is a sign for Burnout, the worker feels that he has no energy to work.
- To has no motivation: the worker who is experiencing Burnout may feel that there is no need to work or in other words the worker loses enthusiasm in his job
- To be frustrated: the worker seems pessimistic losing the desire of work or deal with people.
- To have cognitive problems: Burnout affects the ability of attention of the worker. Because of the burdens of dealing with children, or old people, the worker may lose his concentration in daily life.
- The performance of the worker degrades if we compare it with the previous performance through last period.
- To have too many arguments at work or home, the worker who has burnout suffers from entering conflicts with people in workplace due to the deformed physical state he has.
- To stop caring about yourself : the poor workers of the depressing jobs we mentioned before begin to forget caring about their health , smoke more cigarettes , to eat junk foods because of not having time to cook food at home, and to drink too much coffee at the end of the day to release the stress related to the work.
- To be preoccupied with work when the workers are not at work, because of the stress and job burnout caused by those hard and depressing jobs.
- To have Decreased Satisfaction: to feel less happy and less satisfied with their career and with the home life of those workers. workers might feel dissatisfied in the community or with the social activities, Dr. Ballard said.
- To have Health Problems: After spending much time in working in those depressing jobs we mentioned before, serious chronic stress may create fatal health problems like heart disease, and depression.
The workers who are experiencing Burnout and the employers should do some things to help prevent Job Burnout and depression in those jobs we mentioned at the beginning of the research?
The employees should take break to relax from time to time for example, the employees should listen to quite music, to go to gardens with their friends, to want actually to relax, to read books, or to take up meditation. The employees should also practice their favorite sport to decrease the rate of depression and job burnout which linked to the effects of those works like the consequences of working as healthcare specialist , social workers , food service workers , and personal care specialists in order to overcome those bad effects , all of them should take 2 days for relaxation a week to be able to continue practicing those last jobs , the employees of those jobs should use technology in promoting their abilities and their skills in their jobs , they can attend online courses I n the web of the internet . The employees should get enough sleep, for example they should sleep 7 to 8 hours per night, this enough period of sleep helps the employees to increase their motivation and also to improve their memory, sleeping enough time participates in overcoming Job Burnout and stress. The employees who suffer from job burnout should consult specialist of psychology to examine them helping them to reach a method of treating with people well (customers of those depressing jobs we mentioned before, food service, personal care, health care, or social workers).
Employers of those depressing jobs should do great effort to stop stress caused by the pain of the jobs, as they should teach them that those hard jobs require double effort in doing it, they should convince the workers that if they do their best at first, they will find their jobs so easy to fulfill, employers should also hold meetings to their employees to train them to learn the strategies of dealing with every class of people, like old people, children, youth, and sick people to avoid stress, depression, and job burnout.
Emotional Labor
Hochschild defined emotional labor as “the management of feelings to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display.” Ash forth and Humphrey11 defined emotional labor as “the act of displaying appropriate emotions, with the goal to engage in a form of impression management for the organization.” They proposed that emotional labor should be positively associated with task effectiveness, provided that the clients perceive the expression as sincere.
Morris and Feldman5 defined emotional labor as the “effort, planning, and control needed to express organizationally de¬sired emotion during interpersonal transactions (p. 987).” This definition includes the organizational expectations for em¬ployees concerning their interactions with the clients, as well as the internal state of tension or conflict that occurs when employees have to display fake emotions, which is known as emotional dissonance. Grandey defined emotional labor as the process of managing emotions such that they are suitable to organizational or professional display rules.
Depression
Depression can be defined simply as the state of not having any desire of living , working , or meeting anyone , the state of depression can be caused due to failure in any domain of the man’s life such as failing in getting satisfying results from the jobs , in the cases of the fatal negative feelings the employee may be depressed and needs to receive attention from his close friends or from his managers , but if he faces that bad periods alone , he would be depressed , and the recovery to him will be a difficult thing , because depression is linked to the feeling of loss of hopes , so the employers should keep the contact with all of the employees to be sure that they have no stress or psychological pain , the employers should try to end the causes of depression in the workplace to get the desired consequences from the job.
From my point of view , the depressing job can affect the mental wellbeing of the employees as it may reach the extent of depression , for example in the case of the great burdens on the workers of personal care , we find that those workers have to change the clothes of old or sick people every day , so they may feel that this is disgusting thing , as a result they become in a bad psychological state , but they have to do so to earn money to live well , we also find the workers of social works suffer from the unsatisfying treatment of people , as those workers may encounter rude people in their workplace , but they should behave in a respective way with all kinds of people to achieve their goals , we find also that the employees of food service suffer from too many burdens at their work as they should take care of the recipes they cook to satisfy the customers motivating them to come to their restaurant again , and the employees have to be attentive to their time to fulfill cooking the recipes with a delicious taste on time , I agree with the fact that the depressing jobs affect the mental wellbeing of the employees to the extent of depression , because the accumulation of negative emotions may turn to a great sadness and hate for that job , and it can easily become a state of complete depression.
Conclusion
Depressing jobs simply are the jobs which carry burdens, negative emotion, stress, and depression to their employees, we talked about some common examples of depressing jobs such as , personal care, food service, social workers, and healthcare workers, these jobs are considered as the highest depression rates jobs as the studies has proved that these jobs participate in the psychological pain of their workers to a far extent.
We discussed some related themes to those depressing jobs such as job stress which can be destructive to the energy of the worker or the employee, we talked about job burnout and the signs which prove that the worker may be experiencing burnout job and the strategies can be followed to overcome the job burnout in peace , in addition we discussed the meaning of emotional labor and its definition according to Hochschild, Grandey, Ash forth and Humphrey.
This research also includes the meaning of depression linked to the bad effects of those depressing jobs, Finally I show my point of view that I agree that the depressing jobs may lead to the extent of depression in many cases due to the injustice, bad situations, or negative feelings which many employees encounter in the jobs of personal care, food service, social workers, and healthcare workers.
