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Forum: Economy brings another kind of depression

The economic effects of the Great Recession have been easy to see: a stock market crash, a sickening drop in home values and household wealth, and the throbbing pain of persistent unemployment.

But a deep recession does more than economic damage. When short-term unemployment turns into long-term unemployment, as it has in this recession to a level unseen since the 1930s, rates of depression (the psychiatric kind) increase, anxiety rises and behavior changes in ways both expected and unexpected.

Take birthrates, for example. They have fallen during the past two years, most sharply in states with high unemployment and mortgage foreclosure rates, like California and Arizona. That's not surprising; couples who are worried about keeping their jobs and their houses are likely to hesitate before expanding their families.

But here's something more surprising: As the recession deepens, participation in civic activities - community organizations, volunteer groups, even church attendance and social clubs - is likely to drop. Sociologists once assumed that during hard times people would naturally band together, if only to protest their plight or to give each other solace. It turns out that the opposite is true: Economic distress causes people to withdraw.

"Rather than get together and hold community meetings or march in protest, the effect of unemployment in the Great Depression was to cause people to hunker down," said Robert D. Putnam, the Harvard sociologist whose book, "Bowling Alone," examines Americans' civic engagement in the 20th century. "We found exactly the same thing in the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s ... and I'm pretty confident we'll see the same pattern in this recession too."

Although a few political movements, such as the "tea party," may have been invigorated by the downturn, more broad-based civic organizations such as the League of Women Voters have seen their membership drop.

Why does civic participation drop during hard times? Jennie E. Brand of UCLA studied the ripple effect of unemployment among families in Wisconsin, and she says there are several reasons: People who lose their jobs feel depressed; they sometimes feel ashamed of their financial troubles; they lose some of their trust in society; and some of them move to new communities where they have no ties.

Brand's most important finding is that the social and psychological effects of unemployment can be lifelong, even if the economic distress is only transient.

"People who lost their jobs, even once, were roughly 30 percent less likely to participate in community activities, and that lasted through their lives," she said of her Wisconsin study. "Twenty years later, they were still less likely to participate."

A study just released by the Pew Research Cent

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