
Unemployment Is Killing 45,000 People Each Year - edward
https://news.vice.com/article/unemployment-is-killing-45000-people-each-year
======
Avshalom
If like me your first thought is how many people does employment kill: about
4.5-7000 a year.

Though that doesn't seem to cover military/law enforcement or secondary deaths
like suicide.

[http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm](http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshcfoi1.htm)

~~~
fishnchips
And it is precisely the number those secondary deaths (eg. suicides caused by
stress at work) that would be really interesting.

~~~
zenogais
So far as I know Japan has a category for deaths by overwork in their
statistics, but US, conveniently, does not.

~~~
mc32
That's because in Japan a number of people actually work to death. Laeve work
11pm get up at 5am work on weekends.... Those people feel an obligation to do
that, occasionally you get the odd person who dies from overwork.

So they have that statistic out of necessity. It's a common enough phenomenon.

~~~
zenogais
I would say that reasoning is a little suspect. This is often considered a
uniquely Japanese phenomenon, but there's a growing body of work suspecting
that isn't the case.

In Japan part of the classification involves unlogged or extreme amounts of
overtime, something we also have in the US (I have personally worked for years
at companies that required a lot of unlogged/unpaid overtime from all of their
employees). The cause of death is often stress related heart attack or stroke,
again something we also have in the US. We know excessive job stress can cause
permanent degenerative damage to the heart. So the fact that the Japanese
choose to classify it as work-related and Americans don't doesn't necessarily
mean such deaths don't exist in the US, or are necessarily too small to be
worth measuring. They just simply aren't measured.

------
nikanj
I would say they're not even trying to serve mobile users anymore, except that
ruining the mobile experience this badly takes a lot of effort.
[https://twitter.com/lwahonen/status/566315464825913344](https://twitter.com/lwahonen/status/566315464825913344)

~~~
jay_kyburz
You can just close the subscription dialog popup.

------
bdcravens
Title suggest causation, but reading the article it sounds like it's a
contributing factor to preexisting mental health issues:

 _" What we see with unemployment is that it increases the risk because it
makes already bad situations worse for some people," he said. "Any kind of
economic strain or unemployment, to the degree that there are already mental
health or substance abuse or relationship problems, can make it worse."_

~~~
mc32
The interesting part is that it's saying that people unused to unemployment
are more affected than those where unemployment I common.

So a country region,city where unemployment is already high, becoming
unemployed there has less effect than exhibited in an area with traditionally
high employment --people not acclimated to unemployment take the experience
harder.

------
tokenadult
In other news, all-cause mortality has been steadily declining in all
developed countries throughout our lifetimes,[1] so with that in mind, maybe
unemployment today is less dangerous than it ever used to be.

[1]
[http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...](http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box/scientificamerican0912-54_BX1.html)

~~~
TheCowboy
It is also interesting that there have been published pieces showing that most
of those gains have been correlated to income. People in the top 50% of income
makers are living significantly longer than those in the bottom.

So I would caution against viewing this whole population study as a complete
indicator that long-term unemployment is now an insignificant problem.

~~~
zenogais
100% agree. Really any kind of knee-jerk rationalizing away of deaths, like
that by the OP, should probably be taken cautiously.

------
scotty79
Not unepmloyment, but rather lack of means caused by not being given them
unless you work but at the same time not allowing to work.

~~~
zanny
Yea, it is almost certainly more desperation. If you give someone a stable
home, food, power, etc - they will find their own thing to do. It is when you
owe thousands in debt, have no income, lost your car, are losing your house,
etc that you become depressed and desperate enough to self harm.

I mean, you can have people who have huge downs immediately after losing a
job, but someone who has just left unemployment compensation would not be
considering suicide if they weren't losing everything.

------
pvaldes
And 4,383 workers died only in USA from job injuries in 2012 (wikipedia)

~~~
nyolfen
the size of both populations should be considered

------
goshx
Just to emphasize: " _statistics of 63 countries_ "

