According to a recent report from the Mayo Clinic, 52 percent of physicians report being burned out, and their incidence of PTSD is 15 percent, four times the levels in the regular workforce and three percentage points higher than the levels found in veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These sky-high stress levels inevitably have quantifiable and negative effects on both patient care and physician well-being. The Mayo Clinic found not only that a 1 percent increase in measured burnout led to a 20 to 30 percent decrease in patient satisfaction but, more worryingly still, that 15 percent of all doctors have issues with substance abuse during their careers, and that their rates of depression and suicide are twice the national levels.

It was added to an already growing vocabulary of work-related ailments specific to Japan, most notably “kacho-byo,” which translates to “manager’s disease” and was coined to describe the overwhelming stress felt by middle managers over promotions, letting down their team, shaming themselves and their families, or, worse still, disappointing their bosses and weakening the company. But where kacho-byo is a problem that only afflicts white-collar workers, karoshi is an equal-opportunity killer that preys as eagerly on blue-collar workers as it does on managers, teachers, healthcare workers, and CEOs.

In the most recent iteration of Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report, it is revealed that only very few people find their work meaningful or interesting. They note soberly that “the global aggregate from Gallup data collected in 2014, 2015 and 2016 across 155 countries indicates that just 15% of employees worldwide are engaged in their job. Two-thirds are not engaged, and 18% are actively disengaged.

2. WHERE DID THE LOVE GO?

“At work, according to the most recent data, less than 16 percent of us are fully engaged, with the rest of us just selling our time and our talent and getting compensated for our trouble. In the worst extremes of always-on, high-stress jobs, such as distribution centers, emergency room nursing, and teaching, incidences of PTSD are higher than they are for veterans returning from war zones. Imagine that. We’ve created work conditions that are so blind to the needs of each human being that they wind up experiencing more soul-destroying distress than soldiers who’ve witnessed the killing and harming of other human beings.

In the aforementioned South African study, for example, it is reported that perceived chronic radical discrimination acts independantly of other demographic variables - including several socioeconomic indicators - to negatively affect mental health. Around the world, young girls and women are particularly vulnerable to acts of physical, emotional and sexual abuse, along with all of the traumatogenic outcomes. Longitudinal studies since the 1930s have documented the impact of unemployment on physical and mental health. But when these forms of social suffering intersect in people’s lives - as in the case of impoverished black women, for instance - the adverse effects are compounded.