Depressions and depressive symptoms play a major explanatory
role to sickness absence and early retirement at the Danish
labour market, and represent a general public health issue.
Modern work life is borderless, transient and lack sense of
community. Aim of study was to analyse the effect of psychosocial
factors of modern work life on the incidence of
depression.
Methods
Baseline data 2000 were collected from a sample of 7588 Danish
men and women aged 40 and 50 years. By October 2006, a
follow-up survey was sent to all respondents. Persons, who at
baseline were unemployed, with current or prior depression, or
missing values, were excluded, leaving 3158 persons for the
prospective analyses. Psychosocial factors of modern work life
2000 were measured by scales on work pressure, work pace,
emotional pressure, learning opportunities, variation of work,
meaningfulness, social support from colleagues and managers,
and sense of workplace community. Depression and depressive
symptoms in 2000 and 2006 were measured with the Major
Depression Inventory (MDI), a scale which provides information
on depressive episodes during the preceding 2 weeks. MDI
score with cut-off at 19/20 was defined as depressive cases. By
logistic regression we calculated odds ratio (OR) and confidence
intervals (CIs) for depression, controlling for age, sex,
occupational social position, family status, alcohol consumption,
seniority and MDI score at baseline.
Results
Preliminary results showed that work pace (OR 1.72, 95% CI
1.28–2.32), emotional pressure (OR 1.66, 95% CI 1.17–2.34),
and lack of sense of community (OR1.61, 95% CI 1.12–2.31)
significantly increased the odds of incident depression. Significant
factors for women were work pace and lack of sense of
community, and for men work pace and emotional pressure.
Conclusions
The findings indicate that psychosocial factors of modern work
life influence the development of depression, and that these
factors may affect men and women differently.