In a new study from UCLA, researchers found job strain and family strain are found to be linked to major depressive episodes and may have different effects on men and women.
They found a person’s situation at home may impact their experience of stress at work and vice versa.
The findings demonstrate the role of familial stressors in mental health among modern working families and help to clarify previous findings regarding sex differences in associations of job strain and depression.
Job strain has been found to be consistently related to mental health conditions such as depression, but much less is known about how job strain might affect men and women differently.
In the study, the team used cohort data over nine years among a national sample of 1,581 U.S. workers in good mental health from the beginning of the study.
They found that family strain was linked to a one and half times higher risk of major depressive episode in both men and women; interestingly, job strain was associated with a more than the twofold elevated risk of a major depressive episode for men, whereas job strain did not show a significant effect in women.
The results suggest that while the representation of women in the labor market has greatly increased in modern societies including the U.S., there may be residual effects of traditional sex roles, where men may be expected to be the breadwinners of the household.
The team says these findings have implications for the design and implementation of workplace stress reduction interventions and health promotion programs targeting workers’ mental health.
Interventions may be more effective if they consider factors outside of the workplace, such as sex roles and the family environment at home.
If you care about depression, please read studies about this metal in the brain strongly linked to depression and findings of a core feature of depression.
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The study is published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. One author of the study is Dr. Wendie Robbins.
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