Unemployment Neurosis

Finding a job right after college is no piece of cake, especially in today’s highly demanding job market. The number of unemployed people aged 15-24 expressed as a percentage of the youth labor force gives us the youth unemployment rate. According to OECD, as of November 2023, the country with the highest youth unemployment rate is Spain, with 29.2% in men, and 26.6% in women while the lowest rate belongs to Japan, with 4% in men, and 3.6% in women. Turkey ranks 20th overall, with the youth unemployment rate for men being 13.8%. However, the country slips to 8th in youth unemployment rate for women which is 21%.

According to a New York Times piece from May 2023, one in five young adults is unemployed in China, where the rate already spiked during the pandemic, as a result of which travel was limited, small businesses were decimated and consumer confidence was damaged.

Certainly, many other factors contributed to youth unemployment that preceded the pandemic and deteriorated the market only more with it. These factors include rapid population growth, internal and external migration, problems regarding educational policy, political and economic instability, lack of investment in public and private sectors, the insufficiency of labor quality to satisfy the needs of industry, labor quality, decrease in production caused by an increase in production costs due to high-interest rates were examined in an article for the Journal of Business, Economics and Finance in 2012, on the unemployment generating factors of economic crises during the 1980-2010 period in Turkey, which covers four economic crises. Most of the aforementioned factors, if not all, still resonate with us today. 

But that wasn't what I had in mind. To bore you, reader, with facts about a depressing state I'm currently trying to get out of. I wanted to write about the impact unemployment can have on mental health but without any facts, I feared I would be sugarcoating the reality. 

So I thought I should seek some wisdom. Perhaps an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed a new form of psychotherapy -logotherapy- based on helping patients find meaning in life, was the right person for the job.

For the title, I took a phrase from one of the most popular psychological memoirs to this day: Man’s Search for Meaning by the eminent psychiatrist Viktor Emil Frankl.    

In his 1933 study, which he devoted to a specific type of depression he had diagnosed in cases of young patients, he coined the phrase "unemployment neurosis". He believed the neurosis was induced by "a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life." 

He would then explain how persuading these patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, and public libraries even, improved even their mental health. 

"…their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same."

I believe writing here has a similar effect on me. The meaning of life to me is to reach out to someone, come together, and try to make a change.