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The the worst jolt of joblessness may be that first notice of it—the firing, the layoff, the company closure. That event, whatever its form, typically arouses feelings like grief, as though a loved one had died, according to experts like Industrial Psychologist Joseph Fabricatore of Los Angeles. The victim, says Fabricator, passes through stages of disbelief ("This can't be happening"), shock numbness, rage. The elemental severity of such a reaction tells a great deal about the invisible desolation that is possible—and commonplace—in the world of the jobless. The bruising can show up in feelings of worthlessness. Rage, sadly, often crops up in the form of destructive behavior—wife beating, child abuse, neglect of friends, drunkenness—that increases predictably among the jobless. (In a study of the social effects of unemployment over a 34-year period, S ociologist M. Harvey Brenner of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore found that a 1% increase in the national unemployment rate was associated with a 4.1% increase in the suicide rate and increases of 3.4% in admissions to state mental hospitals, 4% in state prison admissions and 5.7% in the homicide rate.)
Surprisingly, or so it seems at first glance, most of the emotional beating that the jobless take is self-administered condemnation. Says a former publishing company worker in her 30s, who was one of Maurer's subjects: "I was persuaded that I must be not only as bad as the company must have thought I was to fire me, but much worse than that. Probably the world's worst. Probably I didn't deserve to live. It doesn't simply take away your self-confidence. It destroys you." Elliot Liebow, chief of the Federal Government's Center for Work and Mental Health, says that the very nub of the lost-job syndrome is the victim's feeling of being cut off from personal and social power The sense of powerlessness is compounded by all but universal self-blame, says Liebow, adding: "One very destructive thing is the enormous difficulty people have in seeing themselves as victims of the system. They always blame themselves, and it doesn't matter if you're talking about a plant shutdown or a government layoff."
It is not surprising, only ironic, that the unemployed should take such an uncharitable view of their own ordeal. Actually, they have merely carried into joblessness, and applied to themselves, the attitudes inculcated in them by workaday society. The American view of joblessness has never been overly sympathetic. Pioneer America flaunted its punitive sentiment in a vulgar aphorism: "Root, hog, or die!" While that position has been softened a bit (witness unemployment benefits that have ranged from $9 billion the $19 billion annually in the past few years) in the face of the fact that most of today's idleness is involuntary, the nation has not relinquished its basic view of work as sacred and worklessness as sin. Proof that the old creed persists lies in the self-chastising of the unemployed.