Mental health and employment status : evidence from Thailand

Abstract

Mental health and mental disorder are significantly considered to be a worldwide issue nowadays such as depression and suicidal. Moreover, the problem of employment still occurs as an aspect of unemployment or employment status issues in those people who work in each economic sector. The objective of the study was to assess the impact of employment status on mental health and to investigate the relationship between personal characteristics and mental health in Thailand. Moreover, the channels that employment may affect mental health also were investigated in this study. A cross-sectional data, 2014 Thailand survey on conditions of society, culture, and mental health (Thai happiness) from the National Statistical Office Thailand, is used for the study. The data were including 9,260 who are not working (28.09%), 11,039 agricultural workers (33.48%), 2,332 industrial workers (7.07%) and 10,339 service workforces (31.36%). For the mental health state, it was measured using the Thai Mental Health Indicator (TMHI) of the SF-15, including good mental health state, normal mental health state, and poor mental health state. Descriptive statistics analysis was used to describe the baseline characteristics of samples and ordered logistic regressions were used to determine the level of mental health state for people in each employment status. Thereafter, marginal effects were computed to obtain the effect of each employment status, socioeconomic-demographic, and community characteristics variable on the probability of each mental health state. The result revealed that the majority of participants have normal mental health state (56.6%), was female (59.2%), aged over 40 years (72.17%), married (67.9%), and lived in urban areas (54.6%). The results show that employment could impact on the mental health in term of not-working people and agriculture employed, which they experienced lower mental health state than people worked in the industrial sector and the main reason that found in this study it is through income mechanism. Additionally, being females, being head of household, and having insufficient income also had a statistically significant negative correlation to good mental health state in Thai people. Regarding the study results, the agricultural sector is the major employment sector in Thailand, encouraging from the Thai government especially agricultural activities could partially improve the mental health of Thai people. The not-working dimension is one of the concerning issues for the government to support, because it can impact a person’s standard of living. When those who are not working have a poor mental health state, it may lead to social problems. Also, the Thai government should consider the impact of insufficient income on mental health state as presented in this study by the perception of income.