2020 is a year many will be happy to see the back of. It has been a stressful time for sure with periods of lockdown creating major challenges for our day to day work and family lives. But have the stresses and strains associated with lockdown affected the mental health of the UK population as…
Author: Chris Garrington
Leaving school: how do work and family transitions affect women’s wealth and wellbeing later on?
How have the early adult lives of a generation of young women who grew up after the war impacted on their lives now? Baowen Xue and Anne McMunn from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at UCL discuss two new papers which look at life satisfaction, mental health and economic wealth among older women….
Working and caring: the mental health toll of combining paid work and childcare during lockdown
Baowen Xue and Anne McMunn from the ESRC International Centre for Lifecourse Studies at University College London discuss new research showing that women spent considerably more time than men undertaking housework and childcare during lockdown and the knock on for working parents’ mental health, particularly that of lone mothers. They explain how the analysis adds…
Who cares? Looking after mum and dad and links with work and relationships
Who are the ‘sandwich generation’ of people caring for parents while in mid-life? Anne McMunn and colleagues from the UCL Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, along with Age UK, asked whether our working lives and our relationships affect the likelihood that we will take on these roles. Their findings suggest the pool of available…
Retirement: is it good for your mental health?
Retirement has traditionally been seen as a stressful time, with disruption to routines bringing potential health hazards. Recently this assumption has been challenged – maybe retirement could actually be a relief to many people. But the evidence so far has been mixed. Now a new study by Maria Fleischmann and colleagues from the renEWL project at…
Is temporary employment bad for your health?
How is the health of those in insecure jobs affected by their working lives? Rachel Sumner and colleagues* have discovered some types of work may be just as strongly linked with poor health as unemployment is. It’s long been acknowledged that there’s a link between unemployment and poor health. A recent Government Green Paper put…
Are some types of job bad for your mental health? And how can employers ensure poor mental health does not lead to early retirement?
Mental illness is a major cause of early retirement – but do those who are forced to leave work early for this reason get better afterwards? What is the relationship between work stress and mental health? A new study of public sector workers in Finland suggests there is a link – and there are important…
Are universal state pensions discriminating against those in lower-skilled jobs?
With the state pension age likely to rise further in coming years, are policymakers right to link pension eligibility to average life expectancy? In a one-size-fits-all system, which social groups will lose out? Dr Emily Murray and colleagues* used census data to look at who lives longest after leaving work. In most industrialised countries, the…
Does caring for others damage your mental health?
This blog is dedicated to the memory of the paper’s lead author, the luminary Allison Milner, whose recent death has left the world a poorer place. Health work and caring make up a significant proportion of jobs in high-income countries – but how does the mental health of people in those jobs compare with others?…
Domestic work – why do women still do the lion’s share?
A recent international report suggests men need to increase their time spent doing unpaid care work by a minimum of 50 minutes per day in order to do 50 per cent of the work. The report calls for bold measures to help all men do their fair share of this work by 2030 and thus promote…