Career Depression Syndrome
Impact on Individuals and Companies

© 2002 by Jotham G. Friedland, Ph.D., & Sander I. Marcus, Ph.D.

In this article: The Career Depression Syndrome

"Career Depression Syndrome" (or CDS) is a name we gave to a serious career problem consisting of career unhappiness leading to discouragement, self-doubt, feelings of inadequacy, hopelessness, and depression. We see the signs of CDS reported every day in newspaper articles and in the media -- reports of low job satisfaction rates, higher rates of on-the-job stress and career insecurity, and constant change and restructuring of the workplace.

People with CDS may seem clinically depressed, but CDS differs from true clinical depression because the source of CDS is a lack of fit with one's career or job. Still, CDS can take a disastrous toll in lower levels of motivation, productivity, commitment, and bottom-line success. This, in turn, can affect the company.

Because the employee will often hide career dissatisfaction from the employer, by the time the employee with CDS seeks career counseling, it may be too late for the company to salvage that employee's commitment and motivation.

In today's world, any company that takes for granted the commitment of its personnel and ignores the impact of the CDS may be in for an unpleasant surprise in the form of lowered morale, weaker motivation and commitment to the job, lower productivity, and declining bottom-line profitability. In companies with these problems, the employees who are the first to resign and find other employment are often the ones with the most talent necessary for the company's success.

Based upon 25 years of career counseling in which we have clinically interviewed and tested (personality and aptitude testing) over 10,000 people, we believe that CDS is on the increase. Certainly, an increase in CDS can be expected among those whose careers are disrupted by current trends such as downsizing, restructuring, and constant technological changes.

However, we are seeing career depression in people from their mid-20's through retirement age, and many are making a good living in a wide variety of career areas. Twenty-five years ago, perhaps one out of ten career counseling clients had career depression. Today, we believe that it is more than half. By any of the outer trappings of success, they should be happy, but they are not.

We have taken a random sample of clients (out of hundreds seen in the past year) who have been in various levels of career depression, and have correlated their test results on several instruments: Overall, in comparison with test norms, these results suggest that individuals with CDS: The 3 stages of the Career Depression Syndrome

Without taking action and getting appropriate help, the person with CDS will go through 3 stages: Those in Stages 1 and 2 are unhappy, feel "stuck" in their careers, and often are not proactive in doing something about the problem (such as an active job search or obtaining career and job search counseling). They lack self-esteem in their professional role, but not in their basic self-concept as a person. The typical solutions to Stage 1 are job enrichment, job change, or planned career change with the help of a counselor with combined expertise in career and clinical areas. In Stage 2, additional help is needed to remove motivational problems or roadblocks.

By the time a person reaches Stage 3, other areas of life (such as family or social life) are affected. The level of depression and impact on these other areas of life may be so intense that the original career issue can become masked, and the person may be treated as clinically depressed (e.g., take medication, enter intensive psychotherapy). While these measures are certainly appropriate and often necessary, they are not designed to directly address the career and job search issues. Career and job search counseling incorporating expertise in clinical issues is necessary along with these other professional measures.

Are you in one of these stages?

TAKE THIS SIMPLE TEST TO SEE IF YOU HAVE CDS:

Stage 1: CAREER DISSATISFACTION.
  1. Do you have mild feelings of discouragement and depression that affect only your attitude towards your job?
  2. Do you have nagging questions and doubts about the future of your career?
  3. Are you unclear about your career goals?
  4. Do your career goals keep shifting from one possibility to another without any real sense of a clear direction?
  5. Are you missing that sense of joy or passion in your work?
[If you answer "yes" to at least 3 out of 5 of the above questions, you are at least in Stage 1]

Stage 2: CAREER DEMOTIVATION.
  1. Do you feel so unhappy about your career that your motivation at work begins to suffer?
  2. Do you find yourself giving less than your full effort at work?
  3. Are you "coasting" along in your job, just going through the motions, or just "treading water" without taking the initiative or achieving at the levels you expect?
  4. Do you feel basically confident about yourself as a person, but not confident about yourself in your job?
[If you answer "yes" to at least 3 out of 4 of the above questions, you are at least in Stage 2]

Stage 3: CAREER PARALYSIS.
  1. Do you feel trapped, depressed, inadequate, and hopeless when it comes to your job and your career?
  2. Are the other areas of your life (such as family, romantic relationships, social life, hobbies, and health) affected?
  3. In your personal and professional life, do you feel inadequate, anxious, uncertain about where you fit in, and insecure about your competencies?
[If you answer "yes" to at least 2 out of 3 of the above questions, you are in Stage 3]

What to do about CDS

There are two major considerations in resolving CDS:

First, people with CDS have an ability to gain insight into the problem once they understand it. When the CDS is explained to them, they react immediately. They often smile and say, 'Yeah, you understand.' They are able to integrate this insight quickly into their self-concept so that they gain self-confidence from their unique strengths and skills. This, in turn, gives them hope and confidence which carries them through the career counseling.

In other words, career depression can be resolved quickly with the appropriate career and supportive counseling. Clinically depressed people, on the other hand, typically take a long time to develop a genuine sense of hope and self-confidence.

Second, with each particular individual, we make a clear differentiation between people whose depression has its source in physical or psychological causes unrelated directly to career, and those for whom the depression is the direct result of the career issues. For those who are clinically depressed, the career work may be helpful but will not alleviate or resolve the basic unhappiness.

Each CDS stage requires a particular focus, but the overall goals are to provide career direction, increase motivation, and build self-esteem: 5 keys to increasing company productivity

As in other areas of life, an ounce of prevention of CDS is worth a ton of cure. It is far less costly for a company to prevent or minimize CDS than to react to it once it has surfaced. In our experience, there are 5 steps a company can take to counteract the effects of CDS:
  1. Provide career guidance and counseling that is genuinely in the best individual interests of the company's personnel. This will increase commitment to the company because the personnel will see that the company is genuinely concerned with what is in the best interests of its employees.
  2. Identify, recognize, and support individual skills, aptitudes, talents, and other strengths.
  3. Provide motivation training that will help personnel recognize that productivity is important to their own individual career development.
  4. Provide training in team-building and personal networking. This not only helps individuals develop a network in which their own productivity is validated, but helps the company by increasing the level of communication and interaction among personnel.
  5. Most important of all, link individual productivity to the bottom-line needs of the company. This gives the individual a true sense of purpose and meaningfulness to his or her efforts, and gives the company an employee with a higher level of motivation to achieve practical results.