ABSTRACT
Simplistic identifications of work as good and unemployment as bad are manifestly inadequate as explanations of observed variations in the effects of unemployment on self-evaluations. Although there were no established scales of mental health in the 1930s, the general experience of the unemployed was clearly an unpleasant one and psychologically destructive. Despite the dominance of descriptive studies, there are a number of models or theories that have been developed to explain the self-evaluative consequences of unemployment. Perhaps the most problematic explanation for the negative effects of unemployment is that used by a variety of studies that can be subsumed under the generic description of rehabilitation approaches. Drawing on medical terminology Warr suggests that analogous to the effect of vitamins on physical health, various environmental factors are influential on mental health. Unemployment is not a static experience but a process. Unemployment is not merely a status, but one stage within a transition that may involve job loss and re-employment.
