My psychotherapist colleagues knew it was coming, but Saturday’s Times confirmed it: the severe symptoms of anxiety, despair, and even sucidality they’re calling “recession psychosis”— not a formal DSM diagnosis— but descriptive enough.

Studies of unemployment reflect that downsizing is the only traumatizing life event which prevents sufferers from returning to their pre-morbid ‘setpoint” of emotional satisfaction: once fired, you don’t return to your previous levels of happiness. The insecurity gets under your skin, staying with you.

It begins here: not only perhaps within 10-day stays in posh psychiatric spas, but also reflected in the 30% jump in calls, last year, to suicide hotlines; and in the increase of economically-based narratives on presentation to therapists—- citing real home loss, real job loss, and the anticipation of both, as the environmental stressors pushing one’s mental equilibrium over the line.

Unfortunately, while enormously beneficial, conventional “insight” therapies are generally unable to address the core of emotional coping. What is necessary for behavioral change (after remediation of the more severe symptoms of major depression) is a different kind of repair. It is coping through the behavioral response of meaningful work.

Simply put, beyond psychotherapy to address our personal crises of meaning, we must create meaningful work to address the realities of personal and familial survival.

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