Career prospects suffer after bouts of mental illness, research shows

For younger workers, an episode of depression is linked to 24% lower earnings more than a decade later.

In the late 1970s, Michael Hansen was making upward of $200,000 a year.

It was a lot of money for someone in their mid-20s. Through a combination of hard work and self-admitted luck, he had become the youngest executive vice president at a national wholesale mortgage lender.

“I had two different suits for every day of the week,” Hansen said. “I had a nice car, a nice house, spending money faster than I could get it.”

Hansen is now 67. Looking back, he knows the lavish spending was also a symptom. Hansen has bipolar disorder, a mental illness characterized by alternating periods of mania and deep depression. At the time, Hansen was being treated only for depression. The medications he was on made the highs higher and the crashes worse.

“There would be days and weeks of time I would barely get out of bed. I wouldn’t bathe, barely ate,” he recalled.

Hansen knew that his co-workers and bosses were aware of his weekslong absences. But he didn’t think he could tell anyone how he was feeling.

His solution was just to hop from job to job, getting out before the bipolar symptoms got too bad. He’d average about two years at each gig. And with every jump, his professional network shrank and his pay stagnated.

“The bottom line was those were all bridges that were in the rearview mirror that were burned,” Hansen said. “Those were acquaintances I could never go back to.”

The National Institutes of Health estimates that about 58 million Americans suffer from mental illness, about 1 in 5 adults.

It’s a major health crisis, but it’s also a serious economic problem.

Researchers at New York University and the Brookings Institution recently looked at the lifelong earnings of workers who experienced depression between the ages of 27 and 35. When those workers turned 50, they were earning 24% less than their peers who hadn’t suffered from depression during their younger years.

“Mental illnesses are particularly insidious because they happen early in life,” said Richard Frank, a co-author of the study. “More than half of the mental illnesses out there happen before you’re like 25.”

The researchers found that younger workers who had serious bouts of depression with multiple recurrences later in life could suffer a 70% income loss. But even milder depressive episodes were linked with fewer hours worked, lower-paying occupations and lower pay.

“Your on-the-job learning, your on-the-job experience, in a sense building up a resume and the career, is disrupted,” Frank said.

Frank’s paper primarily tracked young workers who experienced depression in the 1990s. But a lot has changed since then. Treatment is more accessible, the drugs are better and many employers are more accommodating.

“Oh, it’s changed drastically,” said Tina Thornton, who helps lead the well-being and safety program at Nationwide Insurance. “I mean, you didn’t even talk about it back early in my career. No one talked about mental health at all. And it was very stigmatized.”

She said more companies realize they have to take mental health issues seriously, and not just because it’s the right thing to do.

“I think there is always a business part of it, for attraction, retention, absenteeism, presenteeism,” Thornton said. “When you do it well, people want to work for companies like that.” 

Managers at Nationwide and elsewhere are now instructed to watch for changes in employee behavior that might indicate depression — less smiling, less engagement, a disheveled appearance. 

It’s a tricky and delicate task for bosses, especially over Zoom. But it helps that now more workers are forthcoming with their symptoms, especially younger ones.

“My current managers are aware that I go to therapy. I’ve told a previous boss that I am suffering with a period of depression,” said Morgan Zheng, who is 24 and works in financial services consulting. Before that, he worked in private equity — a competitive environment, but one that provided him support.

“I was going through a depressive episode. It became apparent to my colleagues that this was something that I was going through, and they obviously wanted me to get my mind right,” Zheng said.

They gave him a week off, which Zheng said helped tremendously. He knows that depression is going to impact his work life. It can’t not. 

But he doesn’t really fear that it will derail his career, Zheng said. Part of that is choosing jobs that work better for his mental health to begin with.