A recent study has stated that people who work for really long hours at a stretch with high job demands are more likely to undergo depression.
New interventions targeting on the combination of “long hours/overworked” (LHO) might prove to be helpful in reducing the risk of depression in the workplace, according to the report by Drs. Takahashi Amagasa and Takeo Nakayama of Kyoto University School of Public Health.
The researchers studied that job and workplace factors were the cause of increasing depression risk in a group of 218 Japanese clerical workers.
The researchers further found that those employees who worked long hours (at least 60 per week) and pursuing high job demands (which means having too much work almost always) were at a greater risk of depression.
According to the study the workers who initially had the LHO combination were 15 times more at risk to have depression when re-evaluated a few years later.
Other factors being adjusted, workers who went from LHO to non-LHO status were at much lesser risk of depression, while those who moved from non-LHO to LHO were at an increased risk.
The risk of depression in the LHO workers kept increasing with time.
Many of former studies have reported mixed results in context to the physical as well as the mental health effects of working for long hours.
The recent study has highlighted the importance of high job demands and an overworked feeling—combined with long work hours—as a risk factor for depression in employees.
The study is published in the August Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, official publication of the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (ACOEM).
