How Job Loss Is Like Death

If you've ever been "involuntarily separated" from your job, you may have felt that the loss was the same as if someone close to you had died. Now research shows that you were right: being fired or laid off can feel just like the sudden death of a friend or family member.

Writing in Career Development Quarterly, Janice Brewington and colleagues compared "grief scales" for people who had recently lost their job with those for people who had lost someone close. They measured despair, anger and hostility, guilt, social isolation, loss of control, rumination, depersonalization, somatization (medical symptoms with no known cause), and death anxiety in both groups.

What they found was that the grief measures were very similar between the two groups, with only the depersonalization measure showing a moderate difference.

However, unlike grief over a death where time eases the pain, ongoing unemployment worsens the grief-like feelings. Despair, anger-hostility, and social isolation are just some of the measures that worsen with continued inability to find new work.

On the positive side, the researchers found that longer notice periods can lessen the impact of involuntary separation.

In an earlier study, researchers in the UK found that 27% of unemployed men experienced a clear grief-like response to their job loss.

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A partial extract of the article in Career Development Quarterly is here. The full citation is "Brewington, Janice O., Sylvia C. Nassar-McMillan, Claudia P. Flowers, and Susan R. Furr. "A preliminary investigation of factors associated with job loss grief.(Brief Report)." Career Development Quarterly 53.1 (Sept 2004): 78(6). "