Job Strain Leading to the Effects of Mental Health

Job Strain Leading to the Effects of Mental Health IssuesJob Strain Leading to the Effects of Mental Health IssuesAmanda Monique AlvarThe University

Spring 2020

ABSTRACTThe word Mental Health has been a very serious awareness that the world has been taking into consideration lately. Work has been a global threat to many individuals in multiple ways that affects their intra and interpersonal levels. Through modern research, it has been recognized that the increased statistics of employee’s mental health is a critical dominant in their overall health. By having poor mental health, you can also have misleading factors that affect their own personal health. Personal health problems that can arise are hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, and much more. Although mental health affects physically, it also affects psychologically. If the work atmosphere is not pleasing or comfortable for the employee, problems will begin to arise psychologically. If the individual begins to build negative characteristics at their work, they can bring those stressors home and cause conflict with the family. Work related stress is a major conflicting factor because it can lead to poor productivity, poor work performance, and increase human error. This stress is very related to pressure, and due to jobs requiring different work ethic, the pressure can be significantly excessive compared to others. Another affecting factor that causes work strain is, unemployment. This is a major concern for the people who work to survive and provide. When an individual is working, their main reasons is to, “support the family, feed the family, and pay the bills”. With an invisible enemy such as “work stress”, this study is going to perceive different ways that work-related stress can cause impact towards the middle age adult’s self-efficacy. Job Strain Leading to the Effects of Mental Health IssuesJob Strain Leading to the Effects of Mental Health IssuesSigmund Freud once mentioned, “work and love were the most important factors affecting humans”. Taking this quote into consideration, significantly means that individuals should enjoy and feel comfortable working in their environment. If an individual feels uncomfortable, negative energy, or work-related stress can all be significant factors to bring in problems into their intra/inter personal levels in life. For this research, I want to identify the leading factors that affect work related stress for middle-aged adults, and determine the effects of those factors. By identifying the factors, one can determine ways to work with the factors to avoid work related stress. Research has provenEvidence suggests that the main factors that affect work-related stress are “Superior relationship, co-peer relationship, job insecurity, family related conflicts, high demand requirements, and bureaucratic constraints. According to, (Rajgopal, 2010) these 6 factors are the main leading factors that lead to work related stress. Since occupations are more at risk of mental health compared to others, ways to determine these factors are by providing health assessments through the company’s quarterly so that the individuals can reflect on how they feel interpersonally. (Maulik, 2017). When individuals can take the time to reflect on how their work-related pressure is, it can really affectimpact the outcome of job performance, energy within colleagues, and reduce the risk of developing health complications. (Espina, 2019).The health topic that I have selected for this study is how work-related stress effects the mental health of middle aged adults in San Antonio, TX. The reasoning that I chose middle aged adults is because that’s when most people begin to search for serious jobs, begin families, move out of households with a new partner, and try to settle in life. By having all these factors behind them, including a job, can be an emotional load for an individual dealing with all this at once. (Rao, 2012). I want to perform a cohort study design for this study because I want to apply two comparison groups. One group will be “the healthy group”, and the other will have “diagnosed psychological problem”. The reason behind this cohort study is that I will be able to observe and collect qualitative and quantitative information from my participants while reducing biased information as best as possible. Since I have selected a specific location for my study, this will allow me to collect data efficiently. I will first begin my study by collecting information from San Antonio Metro Health, and Texas DHHS to perceive what area codes are affected the most by work related stress and mental health. I will issue out a home survey to the participants in the area codes that are needed with instructions to follow. They will have to answer the questionnaire as accurate as possible and return it with a pre-paid stamp followed by an incentive for replying. Once responses have been collected, I will contact the participants through a phone interview to instruct the following procedures to continue the research study. This will allow to gather some of their health information, socioeconomic standing, and health diseases if any. (Guglielmi, 2013). My specific aims for this research is to determine that if participants get affected by work related stress, which results mental health problems. I also want to determine if work related stress reduces self-efficacy towards the participants which results in poor work energy or cooperation with colleagues. This will allow me to determine if these factors affect the individual mentally, and try to figure out on ways to improve this work-related stress. According to a very similar study done by Lerner (2019),, has proved to show very accurate results from the participants. In this research, the author used Work Limitation Questionnaire, which a questionnaire that is fully validated for employed samples with or without mental health issues. (Lerner, 2019). Hopefully after gathering some mixed method data from the participants, I will be able to organize the cohort study with accurate results in which can generalize larger populations. After the study, I am hoping to discover some effective factors that apply to the individuals who have healthy mental health and to the ones with mental health issues. By determining the work-related stressors, I am hoping to prove my hypothesis correctly in which I can raise mental health awareness when it comes to work related stress to prevent health complications and live a healthy stable life physically and mentally.

ReferencesGuglielmi, D., Simbula, S., Vignoli, M., Bruni, I., Depolo, M., Bonfiglioli, R., Tabanelli, M. C., & Violante, F. S. (2013). Solving a methodological challenge in work stress evaluation with the Stress Assessment and Research Toolkit (StART): a study protocol. Journal of occupational medicine and toxicology (London, England), 8(1), 18. https://doi.org/10.1186/1745-6673-8-18

Lerner, D., Adler, D. A., Rogers, W. H., Chang, H., Lapitsky, L., McLaughlin, T., & Reed, J. (2010). Work performance of employees with depression: the impact of work stressors. American journal of health promotion : AJHP, 24(3), 205–213. https://doi.org/10.4278/ajhp.090313-QUAN-103Maulik P. K. (2017). Workplace stress: A neglected aspect of mental health wellbeing. The Indian journal of medical research, 146(4), 441–444. https://doi.org/10.4103/ijmr.IJMR_1298_17

Menéndez-Espina, S., Llosa, J. A., Agulló-Tomás, E., Rodríguez-Suárez, J., Sáiz-Villar, R., & Lahseras-Díez, H. F. (2019). Job Insecurity and Mental Health: The Moderating Role of Coping Strategies From a Gender Perspective. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 286. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00286

Rajgopal T. (2010). Mental well-being at the workplace. Indian journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 14(3), 63–65. https://doi.org/10.4103/0019-5278.75691Rao, J. V., & Chandraiah, K. (2012). Occupational stress, mental health and coping among information technology professionals. Indian journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 16(1), 22–26. https://doi.org/10.4103/0019-5278.99686