BY_THE_NUMBERS

The Science of Job Loss: Why It Hurts More Than the Missing Paycheck

The inner script after a layoff says the pain is about money — and that if you're falling apart, you're weak, and if you keep getting rejected, you're defective. Ninety years of research tells a different story. Work quietly supplies things besides income — time structure, social contact, shared purpose, status, activity — and losing them hits mental health hard: meta-analyses find roughly twice as many unemployed people show psychological distress as employed people. The distress is a documented consequence of the situation, not a verdict on you. Here's how the science of unemployment was built, and what it actually found.