Working long hours is associated with depression

People who take Effexor for diagnosed depression have various reasons for feeling overwhelmed or sad, some of which might be career-related. Two recent studies have shown that working long hours might contribute to major depressive disorder.

The most recent study, published in the August 2013 edition of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, examined long hours and overwork, which was termed LHO by the Kyoto University of Public Health researchers. Those who were described as LHO were people who said they "usually" had too much work and spent at least 60 hours per week working. Of the 218 clerical workers evaluated, those who both worked long hours and were overworked were 15 times more likely to be depressed than their counterparts who were not LHO when interviewed between one and three years later.

Additionally, those who moved from LHO to non-LHO status had a decreased risk of depression, while those who moved from non-LHO to LHO status were at greater risk for depression. This tendency apparently increased over time.

While other studies have affirmed that long work hours are not necessarily detrimental to one's mental health, the Kyoto researchers found that combining long work hours with a heavy work load was an important risk factor that hadn't been studied before.

Another study, published in PLOS ONE in January 2012 by researchers from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, examined civil service workers in higher-level jobs in Great Britain. The authors found that those who worked more than 11 hours a day were more at risk for a major depressive episode than those who worked only seven to eight hours a day. The significance of these findings is that most of the individuals were men from higher economic classes, a typically low-risk group.