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SeedPublished 2026-10-26

Mental health and the labour market

Mental health, depression and anxiety appear on 238 recent papers, but most are economics papers on causes or AI papers that detect depression; only 22 carry an employment, earnings or labour-market keyword. Mental-health conditions are now a leading cause of work incapacity in many countries. What do they cost in jobs and earnings, and what brings people back?

economicshealthlabor

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 238 papers carry a mental-health, depression, anxiety or psychological-well-being keyword (103 in economics journals, 82 in AI, most of them on detecting depression from text or signals): "mental health" on 50, "depression" on 23, "anxiety" on 22. Only 22 also carry an employment, earnings, productivity, absenteeism, unemployment or labour-market keyword.

Questions#

  • After a first diagnosis of depression or anxiety, how much do employment and earnings fall over five years, and how much do they recover with treatment?
  • Do faster access to therapy or employment-support programmes (individual placement and support) bring people back to work, and at what cost per job?
  • Is the rise in disability claims for mental health among young adults a change in health, in diagnosis, or in the rules?

Data that could help#

Linked health and employment registers (Scandinavia, the Netherlands), disability claim records, and trial data from employment-support programmes.

Next step#

Use linked register data to trace employment and earnings around first mental-health diagnoses, compared with people diagnosed a few years later.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
mental health3#776187
depression1#288171

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/mental-health-and-the-labour-market.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Mental health and the labour market. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 26, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mental-health-and-the-labour-market

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-mental-health-and-the-labour-market,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Mental health and the labour market},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/mental-health-and-the-labour-market}},
  urldate = {2026-10-26},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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