I think of the many people I know who got knocked down and never got back up. I think about my friend Lyn, who just couldn’t take it. I know there must be thundreds of thousands in the same horrible place:
A comprehensive study of long-term unemployed published by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development in 2011 found that the vast majority of unemployed workers experienced stress in their relationships with family and friends and that at least 11 percent reported seeking professional help for their depression within the previous 12 months.
One in two of the respondents in the two-year national study said they began avoiding friends and associates out of a sense of shame and embarrassment — a self-imposed isolation that hurt their ability to network to find work.
“Because of the persistence of high levels of long term unemployment there are millions of people who are suffering from mental health problems and many of them are going untreated by professionals,” Carl Van Horn, a professor of public policy and economics at Rutgers and head of the Heldrich Center, said this week.
“Losing a job is more than just a financial crisis for people,” Van Horn says. “It creates numerous other damage: stress, anxiety, substance abuse, fights, and conflicts in the family and feelings of embarrassment and depression.”
The plight of many of the long-term unemployed became even direr in late December after Congress allowed jobless benefits to expire for more than 1.6 million Americans. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) vowed that renewing an extension of federal unemployment insurance benefits would be the first order of business when the Senate returned in January, but Republicans have blocked Democratic efforts to extend the program for those who exhausted their 26 weeks of state benefits.
“There are now 1.6 million unemployed Americans cut off and 2.3 million children affected,” said Sarah Ayres, a policy analyst with the liberal Center for American Progress. “This money is going to people who are going to spend it — they’re putting it right back into the economy. This is really a self-inflicted economic wound.”
The number of individual recipients whose benefits expire runs to about 70,000 a week.
The mental health crisis among the long term unemployed rarely gets much attention, although Van Horn has described the combination of long-term unemployment and diminished government support as “a silent mental health epidemic.”
Long-term unemployment frequently causes depression, drug and alcohol abuses, spousal abuse, divorce, and even suicide. Many of these unemployed Americans couldn’t afford to seek professional help because they lost their employer-provided health care insurance when they were laid off. At the same time, federal, state, and local governments cut back on spending for mental health clinics and outreach in response to budget crises spawned by the bad economy.
A 2013 Urban Institute study on the consequences of long-term unemployment found, “The long-term unemployed also tend to earn less once they find new jobs. They tend to be in poorer health and have children with worse academic performance than similar workers who avoided unemployment.”
Thanks to Patrick Rooney.
It certainly appears that the oligarchy couldn’t care less about anybody outside of the plutocrats in their class. Look at any published graph that reflects income/wealth distribution in the United States over the past 100 years. What you’ll see is a wide disparity of income/wealth between the 1% and the 99% until the start of WWII. For 40 years after the outbreak of WWII the income/wealth gap closed dramatically. Then Reagan was elected. Since 1985 the income/wealth gap has widened to levels never before seen in the history of the United States. That’s why Reagan is revered by Republicans who are the 1%. And why Bill Clinton is well liked.
Add them to the Rethug body count, when the crime’s against humanity charges are laid.