Originally published here.
Discrimination is defined as differential treatment of individuals due to actual or perceived membership in particular groups (Williams et al., 1994), such as sex, age, ethnicity, religion, health or sexual orientation. Although evidence indicates that experiences of discrimination can severely affect mental health (Vargas et al., 2020), only few studies have examined the mental health-related consequences of discrimination in the workplace. These studies found that workers reporting workplace discrimination had lower levels of psychological well-being than workers not reporting discrimination (Hammond et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2016; Marchiondo et al., 2019; Schütte et al., 2014).
Most of these studies, however, were based on cross-sectional designs, severely limiting the possibility for causal inference and rendering the studies vulnerable to common methods biases and inflated effect estimates (Podsakoff et al., 2003). To the best of our knowledge, only one study has prospectively investigated the association between workplace discrimination and mental health (Marchiondo et al., 2019). This study found that perceived age discrimination at work predicted elevated depressive symptoms over time. However, the study from Marchiondo et al. (2019) examined changes in depressive symptoms but not onset of depressive disorders and, therefore, the present study contributes with new knowledge by analyzing the prospective association between workplace discrimination and onset of depressive disorders.
In this prospective cohort study, self-reported exposure to workplace discrimination predicted onset of depressive disorders in a population free of depressive disorders at baseline. The strength of the association between the predictor and the outcome attenuated when we adjusted for psychosocial working conditions, suggesting that factors in the psychosocial work environment may play a role in the association between workplace discrimination and onset of depressive disorders as either instigators, mediators, or moderators – an issue that warrants further research.
However, even after adjustment for other psychosocial work environment factors, the estimate for the association between workplace discrimination and onset of depressive disorders remained considerably and statistically significant, both in the main analysis and in the sensitivity analysis, suggesting that workplace discrimination is an important predictor of onset of depressive disorders. Following the perspective of Semmer et al. (2007), acts of workplace discrimination may be considered offenses to the ‘self’ of the targeted individuals.
Accordingly, such offenses to the self may have a negative impact on the self-worth of the targeted employees and in cases of extended exposure to acts of workplace discrimination, the exposure may consequently have an adverse impact on the mental health of the targets. Indeed, in discussing their prospective results, Marchiondo et al. (2019) conclude that extended exposure to age discrimination may overwhelm the ability of exposed workers to cope successfully with these exposures, which ultimately may lead to adverse health-related outcomes, such as depressive disorders.
The results are in accordance with previous cross-sectional studies (Hammond et al., 2010; Kim et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2016; Schütte et al., 2014) and one prospective study (Marchiondo et al., 2019) reporting that exposure to workplace discrimination is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. To our knowledge, the present study is the first one providing prospective evidence on the association between workplace discrimination and onset of depressive disorders. Accordingly, the present study meets the call for research on the association between discrimination and health (Williams et al., 2008), and the call for longitudinal studies on the association between discrimination and mental health (Vargas et al., 2020). Finally, other studies showed that the global burden of disease related to mental health issues is on the rise (GBD 2019 Mental Disorders Collaborators, 2022). Efforts to reduce the prevalence of depressive disorders may, therefore, take its' point of departure in combatting work-related acts of offensive behavior in general and acts of workplace discrimination in particular.
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