Dealing with Stress from Home Fatality Report

An Uber software engineer making a six-figure income killed himself in 2016, with his family blaming workplace stress. A 21-year-old Merrill Lynch intern collapsed and died in London after working 72 hours straight. When ArcelorMittal closed a steel plant that it had taken over, a 56-year old employee died of a heart attack three weeks later. His family said it was the shock. And the Agency for Safety and Health at Work has reported that over half of the 550 million working days lost annually from absenteeism “are stress related”.

In 2015, an analysis of almost 300 studies found that harmful workplace practices were as bad for mortality, and as likely to lead to a physician-diagnosed illness, as second-hand smoke, a known – and regulated – carcinogen.

Harmful workplace practices include things like long working hours, work-family conflict, and economic insecurity arising from job losses and not having regular or predictable work hours, an absence of job control and, in the US, not having health insurance.

The World Economic Forum estimates that some three-quarters of health-care spending worldwide is for chronic disease and non-communicable diseases account for 63 percent of all deaths. Chronic disease comes from stress and the unhealthy behaviours such as smoking, drinking, taking drugs and overeating that stress induces. Numerous surveys show that the workplace is a leading cause of stress, and it is thus one important cause of the health care crisis.