http://news.yahoo.com/overeducation-linked-poor-mental-health-123410941.html'Overeducation' Linked With Poor Mental Health
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer 1 hour ago
Health
NEW YORK — People with too little education to meet their needs are known to be at increased risk of certain mental health problems, but now a new study suggests that too much education may also have detrimental effects on mental health.
People in the study who were "overeducated" — who had more years of education than their jobs required — were at an increased risk of depression, the researchers said.
The study analyzed information from more than 16,600 employed people ages 25 to 60 in 21 countries in Europe. Researchers measured participants' levels of depression based on their answers to survey questions, and presented their results here Saturday (Aug. 10) at the American Sociological Association meeting.
The reason overeducated people may have an increased risk of mental distress could be because, by definition, they are not challenged by their jobs, and cannot use all of the skills they acquired during their education, said study researcher Piet Bracke, a professor of sociology at Ghent University in Belgium.
They also have jobs with less status and prestige, and tend to have unbalanced support networks — they rely on others for support more often than those people are able to provide it — which may contribute to their depression risk, Bracke told LiveScience.
Previous research in Europe has found that people with lower education levels have about double the risk of having severe and frequent symptoms of depression, compared to people with more education, but the risk varies depending on country.
The new study also found that having many highly educated people in a given country can have detrimental effects on the mental health of all people with college degrees. In countries where more education did not provide significantly more job security or salary, even those with degrees who had jobs that matched their skill level saw declines in their mental health on average, Bracke said.
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Here is the paper abstract.
http://www.researchgate.net/publica...shing_mental_health_returns_to_educationArticle
Overeducation and depressive symptoms: diminishing mental health returns to education.
Piet Bracke, Elise Pattyn, Olaf von dem Knesebeck
HeDeRa (Health and Demographic Research), Department of Sociology, Ghent University, Belgium.
Sociology of Health & Illness (impact factor: 1.88). 08/2013; DOI:10.1111/1467-9566.12039
Source: PubMed
ABSTRACT In general, well-educated people enjoy better mental health than those with less education. As a result, some wonder whether there are limits to the mental health benefits of education. Inspired by the literature on the expansion of tertiary education, this article explores marginal mental health returns to education and studies the mental health status of overeducated people. To enhance the validity of the findings we use two indicators of educational attainment - years of education and ISCED97 categories - and two objective indicators of overeducation (the realised matches method and the job analyst method) in a sample of the working population of 25 European countries (unweighted sample N = 19,089). Depression is measured using an eight-item version of the CES-D scale. We find diminishing mental health returns to education. In addition, overeducated people report more depression symptoms. Both findings hold irrespective of the indicators used. The results must be interpreted in the light of the enduring expansion of education, as our findings show that the discussion of the relevance of the human capital perspective, and the diploma disease view on the relationship between education and modern society, is not obsolete.
