Everybody gets stressed out about their job from time to time. Whether it’s sitting in front of a computer all day, serving customers, or taking your life into your own hands against criminals or Mother Nature herself, a job can wear you down and make the day to day grind exceptionally hard and trying. Some jobs, however, have a greater propensity for putting stress on the people who have to do them. Here are seven professions that seem to make people depressed.
1. Child Care & Nursing Home Workers
It’s the responsibility of nurses and care providers to make their charges feel better, when it’s looking after young children, or helping elderly people with their medications. But doing either is often a thankless, stressful job, where providers are at the risk of a constant barrage of verbal insults and physical abuse, often for just trying to help. In the case of working in a nursing home, care providers also have to deal with making emotional connections to elderly patients who are not far from passing on, and that sense of loss and separation can take its toll.
2. Food Service Staff
Servers work for very low wages in a very pressurized and intense work environment. Being the welcoming, smiling face of their establishment, they are the target for both irate customers and frazzled chefs, even though they (the servers) have nothing to do with the meal’s preparation, or the customer’s enjoyment thereof. The physical stress of balancing numerous plates and dishes does not help, either.
3. Social Workers
Social workers likely chose their field because they want to help people, but they frequently find themselves in the middle of messy family breakups, feuds, cases of abuse and substance addiction. That, plus the stifling legal red tape that binds and guides their professional decisions regarding children and at-risk individuals, makes for an emotionally draining profession.
4. Health Care
Working long, grueling hours and having to deal with death and grieving families will make anyone depressed. And since there are always other patients to take care of, healthcare workers – doctors, nurses, therapists, etc. – rarely get the kind of emotional and mental support they need to cope.
5. Teachers
There’s probably no profession that’s a bigger pressure cooker than that of teaching. Uncontrollable students, hostile parents, helpless or indifferent administration, and politicians always threatening budget cuts is bad enough, but teachers have to carry their work home with them as well. The relentless onslaught of responsibilities causes many teachers to question their calling and worth as an educator.
6. Financial Advisors
Imagine being entrusted with a client’s financial security. Imagine having many clients under your care who look to you to make the right calls on investments and stock decisions. One mistake from you, and that’s someone’s life savings gone. One bad calculation, and someone’s college fund for their kids vanishes. That’s stressful as it is, but the overwhelming feelings of guilt and self-doubt that come when a mistake is inevitably made can push a financial advisor into depression.
7. Artists
It’s tough to think of artists being at risk for depression; but the lack of guaranteed income, long periods of creative dryness, endless rejections from publishers and producers and, for those who do make it big, the constant pressure to turn everything you touch to gold is why many artists suffer from depression, turn to substance abuse, or even commit suicide.
Depression is a serious issue. It is not simply feeling down, and it is not a phase that will just pass. Go to licensed mental health professionals for advice and help on how to get through depression.
