ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the ordeal of being unemployed. The experience of unemployment associated with tragic job loss narratives is a liminal state of transition. Some people described cycles of positive and negative responses to unemployment. In contrast to unemployed people who described cycles of responses to unemployment, a second group were consistently more positive, and a third group were consistently more negative in their accounts of unemployment. At the heart of most people's distress during unemployment was a sense that they were not needed by society. While some felt they had let down specific people, the sense of being not needed was more generalised. In response to the stress of unemployment people typically engage in an active search for a new job. The attempt to find work involves a struggle to escape from the uncertainty of unemployed status. This chapter argues that depression and low self-esteem experienced during unemployment are a product of the way the experience is understood.
