Workplace Fitness: Are you in the most depressing job field?

by Rigel Celeste (Subscribe to Rigel Celeste's posts)
Oct 17th 2007 6:00AM

Categories: Work/Home Balance, Motivation

Think about it for a minute...what job or job fields do you think are the most depressing? The answer is one I think will either surprise you or it won't, depending on your personal experiences.

The #1 most depressing job in this country is:
personal care giver.

My first reaction was surprise, if only because caring for others (the term includes both child care and caring for the elderly) can give a large degree of personal satisfaction and feelings of doing something good for others. But the more I thought about it I realized it does make sense -- working with people is emotional, which even in the best of times can leave you feeling drained at the end of the day and therefore prone to mood ups and (more importantly) downs.

According to the study a total of 7% of the working population suffers from depression, and after personal care workers comes people who prepare and serve food (cooks, bartenders, servers) in 2nd place and health care workers tied with social workers for 3rd. Other statistics they found were that women are more likely than men to experience job-related depression, and (of course) unemployed workers are more susceptible than employed ones.

But there's good news, too, because not only did the study point out the most depressing jobs but also the least depressing ones, which fell into the category for architects, engineers, and surveyors.

Do you think there's anything we can do? Personal/health care and food service make up a much larger percentage of our population than architects, engineers, and surveyors do, and it seems like a really bad idea to ignore something that can be such a detrimental health issue.

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