Veteran Well-Being Driven by Social, Financial Factors

Employment—with the social and financial benefits that it brings—is crucial to the well-being of veterans.

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In a new study, researchers found that having a job “plays a central role” in social and emotional well-being for veterans, including those with psychiatric diagnoses and those with disabilities. It was associated with fewer symptoms of depression and PTSD but also with better social relationships, more positive emotions, and a sense of satisfaction and meaning in life.

Conversely, the researchers note that unemployment is associated with harms:

“Research findings have consistently pointed to adverse physical and psychosocial consequences for unemployed veterans, encompassing heightened rates of suicidal ideation, substance use, mortality, and psychosocial distress,” they write.

According to the researchers, the financial security that comes along with employment is crucial for emotional well-being; other aspects include the social and meaning-making elements of the workplace.

The study was conducted by Emre Umucu and Beatrice Lee at the University of Texas, El Paso. It was published in the journal Stress and Health.

A study conducted by Emre Umucu, Ph. D., an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Texas at El Paso (left), and Beatrice Lee, Ph. D. (right), an assistant professor in the same department, found that employment is vital to emotional well-being for veterans with mental illness. The study was published in the June issue of the journal Stress and Health. Credit: The University of Texas at El Paso.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. If you’re wellbeing is driven by financial factors, then it is also driven by a fear of insecurity, and a longing to escape what is. Why? Because such a life is patently an absolutely meaningless one, and that applies to almost the whole of society. If we try and find wellbeing through money, through saving a little this week so we can afford a meal out next week, then we are utterly and completely lost. The meaning of life is in ourselves and each other, not saving a little this week so we can afford our basics next week – such activity is a much needed distraction from the truth that our life is utterly meaningless. BUT – seeing that fact takes you well beyond this fact and into the true meaning of existence. We are each other and into the bright infinity of love, that space which holds all the things it loves, those things which love the nothing that we are.

    We must hate the self. It must be our new religion. Take away the one and only infinity is left.

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