"Gissa job": the experience of unemployment.
Authors: R Smith
Journal: BMJ (1985)

Failing losing your job (not voluntarily quitting it) and taking a long time to get another one, the best way to begin to understand the truth about unemployment and to get within the skin of the experience is probably not to read reviews in the Journal of Applied Psychology or the BMJ but to go and hang around on street corners in Sunderland, Wigan, or Brixton. There is, of course, a strong tradition of this sort of approach?Orwell did it in the 1930s1 and Campbell2 and Seabrook3 have done it in the 1980s. Indeed, in the 1930s the gap between academic and literary/political/observa? tional studies (call them what you will) was not as wide as it is now, and the classic study by Jahoda and others on Marienthal, an ex steel town in Austria where almost everybody was unemployed for nine years, grew from her and her politically committed friends leaving the lusher pastures of nearby Vienna and going to see what they could do to help the unemployed of Marienthal.4 They were scientists who did not believe in fading into the background. In a similar vein, the outstanding review of all the work done in the 1930s on the psychological effects of unemployment places great importance on the writings of those with inside experience: it starts by imploring its scientific readers to try to grasp the full, poignant, emotional feeling of unemployment by reading a selected list of novels, plays, and case material.5 Novels take longer to incubate than journalism so we must wait for best of the novels on unemployment in the 1980s, but in addition to the writings of Campbell and Seabrook and a host of rather dry studies of unemployment we have had Alan Bleasdale's popular television series, The Boys from the Blackstuff  Fagin and Little's descriptions of unemployment in families,6 Marsden's verbatim accounts from the unemployed (accompanied by Duffs photographs),7 and our own series from general practice.81S Anybody who concentrates mostly on the more statistical and scientific studies needs often, I think, to return to these first hand accounts of what it is like to be jobless. Studies of the associations between unemployment and various measures of physical and psychological health are beset by methodological problems, and those who are more interested in statistics than individuals may begin to feel that the damage done to health by unemployment has been exaggerated. It is then that you must go back to the accounts because they paint a desperate and painful picture. Most people who are jobless for any length of time hate the experience and long for a job: their lives, experiences, and relationships begin to empty and count for much less. Harrison described it well when he said: Prolonged unemployment is for most people a profoundly corrosive experience, undermining personality and atrophying work capacities.16 Worse still, many of the long term unemployed are ashamed, horribly ashamed (see box).11317 To help readers return to these first hand accounts I intend to include in each of these articles some of the voices of the unemployed. In the rest of this article I want to give some When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. . . .At the time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about lazy idle loafers on the dole, and saying that These men could all find work if they wanted to, and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier