>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.
The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators. That explains why it is not more likely to happen when the individual being hired is diagnosed ("Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis"), and also why it is more likely to happen when they enter a position of power ("The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.").
I am also not sure if the social contagion model has a lot of evidence for it. If you apply epidemiological models to any data you will get fits for epidemiological model parameters, and those will have a built-in epidemiological interpretation - but without prior knowledge that mental disorders are contagious (I thought most were definitely not?) you would just be making blind nonlinear curve fits to generic functions with many possible explanations.
// The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators
Really strong disagree. In every company I've worked at (4 so far) the level of mental illness I can observe among coworkers is directly related to who was hired, not what we do with them.
As an obvious example, I worked at a hedge fund that strongly filtered for resilience, ability to overcome obstacles, and desire to grow through tough feedback. Almost everyone I worked with there was rational, calm, and sane as a consequence.
At other places where mental attributes weren't considered (so let's say a pure tech interview that doesn't amp up the scenario) you could watch the "crazy" come out of the woodwork there moment something triggered it. And I think specifically you could see them feeding on each other's anxiety in the Slack hangouts, blind, etc.
At some point, seeing 400 people have a meltdown about the layoffs that happened, on daily basis for months, takes a toll on you that's worse than the impact of the layoff itself. So yes I see the chorus of crazies impact everyone negatively.
I don't want to assume too much, but may I ask how well set up your safety net is in case you get fired? I'd assume that hedge fund managers are pretty well set up, and they don't have to be too concerned about losing their jobs.
Is it really too surprising people with a less cozy backup fund are anxious when the person next to them lost their livelihood in an instant, especially in this macroeconomic environment where getting hired again is far from certain?
I'm just saying, if losing your job hits the "safety" level of your pyramid of needs, is the looming threat really so unreasonable to be anxious about?
Good clarification. In all cases the people I worked with were highly paid tech workers facing a great job market. The objective reality was "you'll be fine and you'll find a job quickly"
The amount of anxiety was not proportional to these facts.
And then there are psychopathic workplaces where management hires anxious and vulnerable employees in order to maintain their own sense of dominance over those who work for them. I talked with a managerial candidate once who considered this a "good strategy" because "you can make them work 80 hrs a week and they won't complain".
At the end of that interview I wasn't sure if I should call social services or not. It was pretty deeply unsettling for me.
True, was responding to the comment more than the article. That "morale" is contagious does not seem to me to be a particularly surprising finding. Nor that a person's mental health can affect their working relationship with someone and that person's mental health. Anyone who has lead groups of people gets an intuitive sense of that pretty quickly. And I think the author is trying to put that intuition on a more reasoned footing, which I think is a good effort, but mental health is rather hard to measure quantitatively so it resists this form of analysis pretty strongly.
One can make a good case that in the long run everyone is better off with workers rights. The bullying that is so prevalent in the US workplace is deeply unhealthy and at the end of the day, damaging to productivity.
Is it unreasonable to suspect that depressed people can spread their attitudes to other people? The concept of purely social diseases is centuries old at this point.
But for stress - if you were leaving a job because you found it too stressful, wouldn't you be eager to chill out and take things easy at your new job?
This assumes stress always comes from an external source. Most of the stressed-oout people I know actually have anxiety as a personality trait, and stress as a result of it.
It's similar to domestic violence or unhealthy relationships - many sufferers of that are so used to being treated badly they literally cannot imagine a better world and can't spot red flags.
A lot of people create their own stress and are their own worst enemies - you know the type, we all do - when they switch jobs, they don't switch personalities.
Nurses and Doctors wear extensive PPE around known-infectious patients. A huge part of psychiatric care is composing your "mental PPE" to remain objective, and maintain their distance from the patient.
Call depression what you want, but I don’t agree that it is not contagious, along with some other mental illnesses (e.g. anxiety). They’re not “contagious” in the sense that you will receive a clinical diagnosis for depression immediately after being around someone depressed, but I think it is naive to think others are not impacted by their interactions with depressed people.
A few of my family members struggle with depression and also with anxiety. I love them dearly, but spending too much time with them can ruin my mood. It is exhausting to try to be upbeat around someone who is depressed; in my experience, they win, and I am dragged into sadness as well. Similarly, it is stressful to be around someone who suffers from anxiety.
It is widely accepted that mental illnesses like depression and anxiety are positive feedback loops. I don’t know why the same traits that make them so would not be able to impact others.
Environment and suggestibility could explain the contagion hypothesis.
There really needs to be a close proximity to the source; this means that online content isn’t really going to spread it. You need to be physically located in the environment near the people with depression and anxiety.
Also, you have to be easily socially suggestible and open to the input of others, on the level of mirroring and the chameleon effect.
Example: I worked for a boss with depression and anxiety. It never rubbed off on me, but his wife was highly suggestible and she seemed to mirror his foibles and idiosyncrasies.
I don’t know if I would go as far as the conclusions of the Rat Park experiment, but there is something to be said for a healthy, safe, and nurturing environment.
I remember seeing experiments that Facebook had done around changing someone's feed to have more depressing content and concluding that it was possible to change someone's mood by that. Online content definitely impacts mental health, you can see how the outlook of people who are always on Twitter or Foxnews changes.
> it was possible to change someone's mood by that. Online content definitely impacts mental health
For approximately 10% of the population, who are considered highly suggestible. For comparison, Fox News had 1.21 percent of the US population as a primetime audience in 2020. One can imagine how that number increases with shared environments of family, friends, peers, and work (in other words, networks).
My mother is a great example. She won’t take tech advice from anyone in our family, but if one of her close friends shares that same information with her, it somehow becomes history—signed, sealed, and delivered. She’s influenced by her peers in a highly suggestible way.
Don’t know what the Twitter numbers are. In the 1960s, Huxley speculated that suggestibility was as high as 20%, and argued that if you controlled 20% of the population, you controlled the whole of society. More recently, that number has come down to 15%. My point remains the same as before.
You are addressing the effect rather than the cause: Simply removing an anxious person from the workplace won't solve the underlying reasons why that person became anxious or depressed at work in the first place. If you went on a crusade and fired all of the anxious workers, do you contend that will stop the 'spread' of anxiousness among your employees? I certainly don't think so.
I think it does depressed people a disservice to refuse to accept the possibility that depression might be contagious, in order to protect them from being demeaned.
Yes. There's a reason there are support groups for people (spouses etc) who are close to people with chronic depression and other mental illnesses. Because it has an impact of the people around a person afflicted with these illnesses.
If A has hard time supporting/coping with B's anxiety, the it means that A has already too much anxiety.
If I go in a company and others are receptive to my anxiety, then it means anxiety is rampant in that company.
In my country burn out and alikes are increasing very rapidly (like 3x in 10 years). So I believe that the articles says that when your are tired, you're more likely to catch the flu. It's not the flu that is strong, it's the other's that more fragile.
And as someone who got through the burnout big time, I can assure you that this article will be misread. HR depts I have seen have a long way to go before they understand that burn out damages should be put on shoulders on the employee as well as the employer.
If my surgeon had as much education as the average therapist does and surgery science had the replication crisis that therapy does I would call it exactly that: stabbing with medical ivory tower bs… thankfully that isn’t quite the case
You’ve both labeled therapy as an ivory tower and implied therapists don’t have much education; that’s somewhat of a contradiction. What’s your purpose here?
I think a much better analogy than surgery would be a software bootcamp. In the same sense that a classroom-oriented bootcamp is just discussion, therapy is just discussion.
There’s no replication crisis for the greater umbrella question of whether or not therapy is effective. Therapy in combination with medication is provably more effective than either alone (or nothing).
> You’ve both labeled therapy as an ivory tower and implied therapists don’t have much education; that’s somewhat of a contradiction.
No contradiction - The problem isn't education obviously - its that some professions and disciplines are far more likely to produce pretentious ivory towers than others, that I have a problem with. Typically and ironically imo it is stronger in the soft sciences than the hard.
Since you mention surgery as some sort of high-value comparator, surgical training favours people with some unpleasant personality traits [0] (apparently due to the stressful nature of the work), while surgery itself is a very powerful placebo [1].
This isn't to say that surgery or surgeons are evil and to be avoided. Not at all. It just adds nuance to the picture: the degree of training your healthcare professional receives is only one aspect of their job, albeit an important one.
Let's hope your surgeon personality doesn't help them too much with hiding their drug abuse problem if they have one then and that you are not the one going under the scalpel when they first start to lose it.
> Alcohol and drug abuse are a significant issue among physicians in general and surgeons in particular. A recent 7000-member survey of the American College of Surgeons demonstrated a prevalence for alcohol abuse among male surgeons at 13.8% and for female surgeons at 25.4%. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac...
This dictionary and factoid HN comment war thread makes me want to waste karma.
If you feel like diving, I literally got a response from dang a few days ago after absolutely losing my shit in another thread. In that case, the results for myself were not positive, and I regret my actions. At least it was a first offense and I didn’t get banned.
Generally, though, I feel HN is a good place to cathartically vent some heat. The limits/guidelines are set such that you can be aggressive without breaking them. You can add value in an aggressive tone. It’s like a city where the drivers are aggressive. Being kind, the first comment guideline, requires respect as opposed to syrupy fake facades. MMA fighters often respect each other, for example. This attitude is acknowledging the toxicity of anonymous internet culture and making the best of it. It’s an unhealthy place, but there’s value to be made/found. Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
Jjconn’s take that therapy is useless makes me mad, and they’re willing to yell about it. I have something to gain here by learning their perspective.
> Generally, though, I feel HN is a good place to cathartically vent some heat. The limits/guidelines are set such that you can be aggressive without breaking them. You can add value in an aggressive tone.
Venting is okay, but weak rhetoric devices like one-sentence x doesn't work because vast blanket uninformed or intentionally reductionist statement should not get a free pass in the name of conversation. All it does is derail threads and put people who knows better in the position of managing egos while explaining what's wrong and doing it in a way that doesn't accuse the other party of just trolling or something. Or more likely they move on when they've had enough and the cycle repeats with other players.
> Are there any anonymous internet forums good for your mental health? I think not.
>A recent 7000-member survey of the American College of Surgeons demonstrated a prevalence for alcohol abuse among male surgeons at 13.8% and for female surgeons at 25.4%
"Avoid female surgeons" seems to be the thrust of your point here.
Why do you think they're separable? Personality informs decisions and care.
You're not a machine in need of a mechanic. You're a person, and people respond better when they're involved in shared decision-making regarding their healthcare.
> [..] some professions and disciplines are far more likely to produce pretentious ivory towers than others, that I have a problem with. Typically and ironically imo it is stronger in the soft sciences than the hard.
Plenty of pretentiousness among the software crowd as well apparently.
Because I think it is absurd and frankly ascientific how hard people cling to the idea that depression and anxiety are some biological or chemical body problem that is entirely outside their control. That it requires drugs or “special therapy techniques” to improve (Quite a useful narrative if your trying to sell those though)
If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case. Clearly lifestyle choices are a primary factor here but that is so taboo these days to even mention.
What do you mean? Talk therapy makes the assumption that depression/anxiety is not solely biological/chemical, and that the therapy will in some way alter the patient's mindset, lifestyle choices, environment, etc.
>If that were the case population level rates would be relatively stable over time and not vary dramatically by country but that is wildly not the case.
That would be true if and only if the measurements were accurate and did not change by time or location.
The measurement strategies have been changing dramatically in the past decades, and countries are almost universally in disagreement over the (significant) details. Wide variance in time and location are definitely expected, drawing a conclusion based on that is very much standing on shaky ground.
This isn’t necessarily true. There’s a wide variety of reasons for which diagnoses of mental illnesses would vary greatly. Equating Psychology to hard sciences is naive. It is the softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous.
I personally think Psychiatrists in particular have one of the most difficult jobs as physicians. It’s made worse for patients by the fact that a poorly performing Psychiatrist has many scapegoats behind which to hide.
Unfortunately I spend a lot of time around mentally ill folk, myself included. A good dose/choice of medication and a good therapist-client-match work modern miracles on people, and it’s very easy to see when you’re around it. It’s very similar to a surgery with a low success rate.
> softest of sciences, but labeling it as non-science would be ridiculous
It is about as scientific as chiropractics and acupuncture, full of anecdote and very little substance, you even provided some yourself. How can you possibly trust much of anything coming out of those disciplines when the majority of papers can't even be replicated?
As myself and others have pointed out, there is plenty of hard evidence that therapy is effective. Unfortunately it isn’t as optimistic as, say, cataracts surgery. Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant. (Admittedly, it doesn’t help my case that only the recent decades are particularly valuable.)
The purpose of my anecdote was to encourage you to see that you have no personal understanding of the subject. This is reasonable, yes? You appear to have no vested interest in someone who claims to have benefitted from therapy, and it’s very apparent you don’t see a therapist yourself.
There’s no better alternative, in terms of evidence-based approaches, for confronting mental illness. It’s irrelevant here just how good the approach is. It’s simply sick people doing the best they can to get well. From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath (I tend to think you aren’t).
> You appear to have no vested interest in someone who claims to have benefitted from therapy, and it’s very apparent you don’t see a therapist yourself.
I could replace therapy in that sentence with chiropractics or acupuncture and it would express an equally meaningless platitude.
> Suggesting that the recent decades of funding and research in the general psychology domain haven’t yielded good results is humorously ignorant.
And yet if we look at populations (as we do to benchmark real medicine) in much of the western world deaths from despair are up, depression and anxiety are up, population happiness is trending down. What a testament to those decades of research.
> From this perspective, you “having a problem” with it makes you look like a sociopath
This is a clear violation of HN rules, I suggest you take a look at them. What I have a problem with is people being duped into spending tons of money by charlatans. People in need spend money on tons of things they are convinced help them (supplements, psychics, acupuncture etc), that isn't evidence of their utility.
Sorry. Also, it’s not directed at you but rather someone who would deny another what they knew to be good medicine. It would be valid, in that case, would it not? (Still against the rules, I guess. I wouldn’t mind being banned for accurately labeling a sociopath; that would be a decent signal to spend my time elsewhere.)
You actually believe therapy to be a complete farce, which I hadn’t comprehended before this point.
Read some systematic literature review abstracts. Parse some statistics. Ask a physician you trust to explain it to you.
Research doesn’t suggest that therapy improves the lives of everyone but rather that it’s effective treatment for disease. You could similarly find papers that say the same thing about acupuncture or chiropractors: when I say “research” here, I’m referring to many orders of magnitudes more psychology papers. Tens of thousands would pass your replication crisis criticism criteria.
You really should take that chip on your shoulder to a therapist or a surgeon rather than on HN though. Acid comments won't help people consider your point of view if exposed with such aggression.
No, therapy usually involves lots of homework as well. The talking part of it is essential to get there, but if you just go to therapy to talk it won't help much.
This is similar to saying a hiring interview is only discussion, and any acknowledgment of employee skills or hiring techniques is just bs managerial posturing.
Which it is. The idea that you can accurately gauge a person's skills during an interview is complete bullshit. And at the end of the day an interview is just a discussion, people are hired based on how they make the interviewer feel and it will be months before they discover if they are qualified or not.
You can’t gauge them accurately in an interview, that doesn’t mean the skills themselves don’t exist.
Storytelling is just discussion but that doesn’t mean stories don’t exist, or that all stories are the same, that everyone is an equally good story teller, etc.
Look into CBT, which would usually give the patient some tasks (jotting notes when the problem they seek help for happens and how problematic/stressful it is on a 1-5 scale, what happens when they apply some breathing techniques to cope with it, what happened before/after, etc.). Also, phobia treatment where the therapist can walk with you on a bridge to help you overcome fear of height, etc.
More broadly though, the conversation you can have with a therapist has a lot more going on than a regular discussion. Without getting into the details of every school I think it's fair to say that these conversations are guided in subtle and not subtle ways to lead the patient to introspection and self-reflection much more than a drink between buddies at a bar would (which is usually what people on HN tend argue when criticizing talk therapies). Therapists have to assess where the patient stands and feel how far the patient can be pushed to change their outlook on a situation or accept it.
Put in another way: a debate is also more than a discussion, same applies to therapy.
Obviously the only thing that typically happens in a therapist’s office is talking and note-taking. That’s no different than plenty of business meetings. If you want to label those business meetings as just “discussion” you wouldn’t be wrong, but they’re also business meetings.
The communication modality of therapy is voice. Why do you have to ask that here?
Because I like to ask questions to improve my understanding of the world when I notice someone seems to know something I don’t. Almost like we’re discussing things on a discussion forum.
Lol, I came back to remove said snarky remark before you saw it, but you beat me to the punch.
I was frustrated by the naivety of your question in that it implies many folks have no idea what therapy is (and often take a negative attitude, which you’re not doing) and I took it out on you. Sorry.
Therapy is only as good as the therapist, and it's difficult to gauge if a therapist will be any good for one particular person. Getting the right therapist is critical for therapy to 'work'. Same applies for meds. But generally, it's about helping a person help themselves.
I'd amend that to "only as good as the client-therapist fit." A good therapist for you might be terrible for me. Which is why it's so damned hard to find a good therapist. It takes a few sessions to even figure out if this person is going to help. Several months and thousands of dollars later, you might get to start on the work.
Most types of therapy, especially talk therapy, tends to make depression worse. The only two with any evidence supporting them are CBT and IBT [https://www.apa.org/topics/depression/overcoming].
Well, you are right that depression is not an attitude. It's a disease, a malfunction. But like any other disease, it can happen from or be aggravated by external factors.
If you are, to some degree, predisposed to depression, you are more likely to aggravate or trigger it by living in an hostile environment than if you are living your dream life.
It's like being predisposed to cardiovascular diseases : even if you are predisposed, you are more likely to not have any issue if you never encounter stress, eat healthy and have an active life.
Saying depression can be contagious by no means implies that depression is an attitude and not a disease.
While you and I know that, literally up and down this thread are dozens of commenters who do not, and seem to think it is indeed just an “attitude”. Or that being sad is the same as being depressed.
Same question but without the DSM-5 diagnosis? I do recognize that work cultures differ and that people after a few years internalize the work culture. Some firms have massively worse performance on absence, sickness and probably all other kinds of metrics related to well being. So my prior would be one of “totally true”. But keeping an open mind. The same set of observations could fit other explanations like that extraverts with people skills switch jobs more often and that there is clustering of likewise individuals on certain negative traits.
Yes but an attitude adjustment can affect not just that but other well established and chronic diseases. People can literally attiude themselves to death, you can focus your mind enough with a death wishing attitude and you would just die, doctors will tell you that a patient with a good attitude stands a better chance at fighting any disease than a patient with a bad attitude. Your attitude is set in your brain which regulates different chemicals and hormones. When you see an attractive person you get chemicals to make your body react, when your brain thinks it's in danger you get adrenaline,etc... is it so unreasonable for depression to be at least helped or harmed (not caused) by pursuing a good attitude?
Also , I like to think it isn't the attitude that is spreading but that depressed people help set an environment that cultivates depression whether by stress, lack of communication, bad communication,etc... depression wouldn't exactly be the first disease to be caused or affected by the environment a person spends their time in.
If depression can be caused (in at least some cases) by external factors like their environments (which is well supported), and people’s attitudes impact other people’s environments, then guess what - it can be contagious.
You’re wrong. Your own article says that CBT does work.
I’m not a big believer in CBT, but I know for sure antidepressants, as they are used nowadays, is one massive scam.
For the record, I do support antidepressants usage to get out of very dark place initially. But they do not cure it.
We as a society need to put safety nets in place to make sure people don’t fall into those very dark places. Depression is not a virus or bacteria. It’s a socially spreading disease. But we need attitudes instead of masks to stop it. Attitudes held by both patients and surrounding people.
Did you even read the article? CBT and the cognitive model are not the same thing. CBT (the therapy) works, but that doesn't mean the underlying theory is correct.
"Not only is there contrary evidence showing problems with reasoning are widespread as well as potentially associated with mental health rather than mental disorder. But the evidence in favour of CBT’s take on mental illness is tainted because the tests used in these studies do not even track problems with reasoning. CBT provides a compelling story about mental illness – mental illness is associated with “faulty” reasoning, and in resolving this, negative behaviour and emotions are addressed. Unfortunately, research doesn’t quite back up this story."
Yes, I did read. It's funny when something works, literally saving lives, but is called „unethical“ because somebody can't figure out a synthetic test.
Call me conspiracy theorist if you want, but I smell anti-depressant makers money. Fuck overuse of anti-depressants and not paying enough attention to things that do work.
Yes, I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces. Someone who is leaving Blizzard because of a scandal where their assaulting other co workers became public is extremely different from someone leaving Blizzard because their manager assaulted them.
If you came up in a toxic environment that will be all that you know. Good people will come out of certain shops thinking that e.g. firing the bottom % of employees is just something you do and tank all their projects.
The perpetrators and victims are all the same people.
I think I agree with this, but there are also other causes.
Some time ago, I left a toxic shop to join a new company. I found myself aggressively fighting against things that I perceived as toxic based on my previous experience. Even if I was 100% correct (and I certainly wasn't), adding to the negativity wasn't helpful.
> I'd be curious to know if they identified perpetrators vs victims of toxic workplaces.
Simple.
The perpetrators are successful and therefore well adjusted, whereas the victims are defective and have to be excluded lest there be "social contagion".
The conclusion is its own justification.
Or, as it's fashionable nowadays, the "just world fallacy".
A tale as old as time.
Edit:
You already have a parent comment here doing exactly that.
Apparently the healthy environment was at an "hedge fund" out of all industries.
I assume your hedge fund comment is a reference to my post, so I'll reply.
You'll notice that in the HF scenario I described, there was no perpetrators or victims. It was just a group of professionals doing work in a calm and rational, dare I say, sane, way.
So yes, I'll stick with that story as the healthiest place I've ever worked.
And in the other 3 companies I've worked, I've seen lots of examples of employees making themselves crazy en masse when the "trigger" was obviously something not worthy of that reaction.
You have an implicit assumption that people in toxic organizations are split into two binary categories of perpetrators and victims. In my experience, in toxic orgs everybody thinks of themselves as victims, and everybody perpetuates toxic behaviors to some extent.
Also, your comment is talking about value judgements (talk about blame), whereas the quoted text doesn't have them — it is not saying who's the bad guy, it's just saying what will happen, statistically speaking.
I have explicitly seen twice now a manager to come in and make everything toxic purely by herself being toxic. And I have seen a leader to create non-toxic environment. The fact is, managers sets the tone. And when the culture is toxic, the rot comes from the head. Individuals on lower levels can be toxic too, but that spills on others only when management fails.
That thing "the effect was most pronounced in case of a new managers". That is a manager coming in, creating toxic environment and people who are under his/her power adjusting to the situation or leaving.
The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators
I think that part of it is that certain policies, procedures, techniques, etc are more likely to exasperate mental health issues than others. If someone is coming from a disfunctional organization they might introduce some of those behaviors to the team, even at a lower level. I worked with an ex faang employee that complained about the stressful culture, while advocating for the policies and tech of that culture.
Though to be fair, the authors argue that in consequence, companies should actively on-board employees to reduce anxiety from uncertainty and unknown expectations.
> but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators.
Only if you're importing their managers.
Managers focused on MBA crap are bad enough for corporate culture, but those raised in corporate fiefdoms are even worse. When half of their time is wasted on fighting petty fights with other managers instead of working together with them, they waste the time of those below them as well.
It also sounds like it’s a bad thing. But one of the standard plays for startup executives is to deliberately create an influx of people and culture from Amazon, in order to inject fear and grind into an organization they see as too fat and happy. Not only do they believe this effect exists, they lean into it.
I don't think it's correct or accurate to characterize people who are dejected (among more severe things) as perpetrators, as though they were already negative personalities, or "no" people, or some other form of inconducive to a positive work environment:
1) It is entirely possible that a subset of this population organically "grew" this mentality as a result of their previous work environment. I'll admit that early in my career I in fact may have been such a person-- I came from a confrontational environment filled with vicious shouting matches complete with the most vile language you might think of. That was very much not my personality but when I moved on, though I knew that extreme was not usual, it took me a little bit to realize that even a very mild version of it wasn't the norm. (I was also massively, clinically depressed)And given my personality, I was probably a little more shy, withdrawn, that sort of thing. I can easily imagine another person emulating behavior from an awful environment that they grew to think of as the norm. And it was a positive work environment that helped me through, and become a productive group member (professionally. the depression still sucked)
2) Someone with a clinical mental disorder really shouldn't be labelled a a perpetrator. The connotation there is one of deliberate intent. And the fact that such things may go undiagnosed in the clinical sense should also be considered.
None of this is intended to dispute the findings of this article. Though it's an observational study rather than one with an intervention of some sort, so a bit of caution is probably prudent, but it's also a large scale study which helps in that area.
But sure, the study may even be accurate for clinical/pre-clinical people but that doesn't make them perpetrators. They should be treated as people who may simply need a little more mentorship or collegiality in order to find their place in the organization. (or encouraged to seek clinical help if that seems in order)
When the GP was talking about perpetrators, they meant "people who induce depression and anxiety in others". In the context of workplace-associated depression and anxiety, there are people whose management styles cause these problems. People who put undue pressure on others, who demean and berate etc.
Now, these same people may be themselves victims of others doing the same, or they may suffer from their own mental issues, or they may be just be ruthless. But either way, the alternate hypothesis was that hiring this kind of people is more likely to be the cause of the observed effect, rather than any idea of "social contagion".
I don’t think you realize how anti-scientific an attitude you’re expressing here.
If there is “evidence for the social contagion model”, this kind of analysis would be a natural step in developing hypotheses about where and how to look for it. And if there’s none to be found, those hypotheses will eventually fail to hold. That’s the method.
If you choose not to collect data or test hypotheses because you think a question is “most definitely” settled, then you’re not practicing science.
You may be saving wasted effort or managing some kind of socio-political dynamic, which may be more important to you, but some people appreciate science specifically for its ability to upend “most definite” knowledge now and then.
How is it blaming the victims? The initial depressed person that "spreads" their depression to three other people around them is as much a victim as anyone else.
I absolutely have noticed. In interviews, people coming from difficult and stressful positions absolutely radiate this in their interviews! I know that I will feel emotionally drained after an interview with such people. Further, I have explicitly worked to de-condition survival behaviors in negative organizations with new employees multiple times, and it wouldn't surprise me that these sorts of behaviors could be "contagious" in other organizations.
This sounds interesting! If you have time, could you share an example or two? What survival behaviours are you talking about, and what kinds of things do you do to decondition these behaviours?
I started my career in a software agency, maybe I was unlucky, but in this particular agency I overheard the more senior employees staying after-hours and making fun of the the junior employees (in their absence) and the quality of the code they had wrote. There was no actual code review process but this memory had made me very defensive in regards to my code. I was always trying to push the perfect code in one shot, which led me to overthink solution, and if for whatever reason I had to push a rushed change I felt guilty and tried to find excuses preemptively.
At one time I had to onboard the client's new dev team to a project that I had built alone for about one year. The product had become successful so the client wanted to invest in rebuilding it on better foundations to prepare for accelerating its growth.
Working alone on the code for a year had subdued my fears of public shaming but, once I started going through it with a team of seniors looking over my shoulder, my anxiety went through the roof. For every new file I was opening I started my explanation with an apology about the quality of the code and tried to explain why I didn't have the time during implementation to write that code properly.
After the 2nd or 3rd explanation one of the new guys stopped me and said something like: "You don't have to explain yourself to us. This code is the result of the context it has been written in. We are only having this conversation because the product that you helped build by writing that code is successful. Because of this success we now have the chance to spend time and think about how we can improve the code".
I only realized later, but that was one of the most liberating things anyone has ever told me. It felt like a huge weight had just been lifted of my shoulders. People were looking at my code and discussing it not as a reflection of my quality as a person but as the output of different factors and priorities at a given point in time.
I worked with that team long enough to feel deconditioned from the previous toxic behavior.
> "You don't have to explain yourself to us. This code is the result of the context it has been written in. We are only having this conversation because the product that you helped build by writing that code is successful. Because of this success we now have the chance to spend time and think about how we can improve the code"
I don't have HR or management experience, but I can speculate:
- an employee avoids sharing key technical information with colleagues, either verbally or writing anything down, and becomes a bottleneck for all changes relating to some system or component. this could be adapted to maximise tenure at a previous org that had decided to outsource/"offshore" technical roles, where sharing key knowledge would result in you being promptly laid off
- an employee demonstrates an extreme reluctance to estimate when any task they are involved with might be done. this could be adapted to survive in environments where estimates from individuals are interpreted politically as commitments to deadlines for unconditional delivery of work, and used to pressure workers to extract free labor (unpaid overtime)
- an employee never communicates bad news about schedule delays, plans not being feasible, designs having serious flaws, etc. this could be adapted to prior environments where voicing bad news triggers retribution, and only good news flows up the org chart
>- an employee demonstrates an extreme reluctance to estimate when any task they are involved with might be done.
Ah, there are so many reasons for this. I won't give a deadline when I anticipate the requirements will change. Experienced workers can look at a planned implementation and tell management 'This isn't going to work, we're going to have to change this' and be handwaved away, because they know inevitably, after management has played out whatever fabricated 'negotiation' they've set up for themselves, inevitably the requirements will change and a new deadline will need to be established.
I am not the OP, but observed exactly similar behaviour with a senior hire from Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25213817. Also the people who joined from Amazon in our organisation keep playing blame games, and this clearly spreads to other teams as well as you have to blame someone back if they blamed you for what you think are wrong reasons.
my personal experience as a consultant has been outright fear of touching the production servers. Fear as in actual fear response such as nervousness, agitation, facial expressions.
Other examples would be fear of altering any deeper parts of the system due to fear of punishment or war room style crisis.
What's wrong with having a healthy fear of touching production servers? Fear of production is a sign that person has been through some shit and is probably more careful, in my experience.
Touching production is a lot like being an electrician working on a live circuit.
Like the fear of climbing a ladder is perfectly reasonable. Falling would have very real consequences. However one should be able to trust the ladder itself isn't going to fall apart, trust their mate is footing it, and trust their mate who tied it at the top did a good job.
Be very careful who you waste your time working for.
So many companies are cesspools of mental trauma that are very inviting places for the unaware, and if you’re not strong of mind you get to subconsciously carry their issues with you for a long time after.
The original meaning of meme from Richard Dawkins was a mind virus and people still aren’t understanding how damaging and transmissible unhealthy ones are. This paper is a perfect example of them occurring in the real world.
Interesting but I hope the takeaway isn't demonizing folks that are depressed or anxious, or having a thought-police toxic positivity style company culture.
In my old job I had to fake depression. I lived nice bachelor life, some coworkers were jealous and toxic. I lied that my gf left me. I nuked my social media and started posting cats for adoption...Latter got new girlfriend, 10 years older with two kids...
Work become easier. No stress and much less unpaid overtime.
I'm unclear about the posting cats for adoption part. How does that relate to faking depression? Feigning that you were so depressed you couldn't take care of your cats?
I'm not in the valley, but honestly I discard all resumes from former Amazon employees. If the tenure is shorter than 1 year I may take a look, just in case.
As a manager there is no way I'm contaminating my team with Amazon's culture. And yeah yeah "not all former Amazon blabla". Sure, I dont have time to play the odds. We all know about Amazon's toxic culture.
> The effects are particularly strong for newcomers hired into managerial positions and newcomers with long previous tenures in unhealthy organizations.
If it was raw exposure to stressed/anxious people that was the issue, you wouldn't expect this. They're probably just measuring problem people moving between organizations. Someone had to make the unhealthy organization unhealthy in the first place, and that person was probably a manager or long time employee.
>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.
This sounds sort of like victim blaming to me. I've worked in a couple of bad environments and felt outright relief when I was able to go somewhere much better.
The answer is to do away with toxic work environments, not blame the person who suffered under them.
A better analogy would be if you were hiring rapists at your company and it turned out that they had themselves been victims of sexual assault, then you may want to know what's going on.
Your analogy is completely missing the entire point made in the paper, which is that an epidemic model applies in this case.
You don't even have to be at a place to catch it from there.
Just the other week, I was talking with a colleague who was in a depressing and stressful work situation, at another company where I've never been.
Hours later, I had an interview (elsewhere), and my brain was in a cautious-of-problems mode, and not the more appropriate excited-about-new-possibilities mode.
Afterwards, I realized it was reflected in questions I asked, voice tone, etc., and then realized why. :)
fifteen years ago in California Bay Area, when experienced programmers showed up a the door of pre-funded companies, and especially as phones with ads became a huge revenue source, one internal Human Resources message was "do not hire anyone that does not have a job already." This conveniently included those who had their own small business or side-gig priors, as well as those that did not work well enough with teams, and those newly graduated without work experience.
As the raw number of humans with some applicable skills increase world wide, and the disconnect between pre-funded wealthy environments and others increases, new invisible "flags" likely can be applied.
Not to defend the way business is done in China, but I have heard that when they assembled teams for an important new company, they often did not do as the West has done and cast infinitely large hiring nets with infinitely more nuanced and rare characteristics, rather in China the rumor is that they just used who they could find with a reasonable search, and got on with it..
Lastly, it is ironic that the divisive, command and control environments found in long-term stable business, are actually very negative to creative and open-minded people who want to try things.. Yet these "rules" might favor those in the stable business world, bringing all the anti-communication and top-down culture from there. odd times
The near term financial security of people making hiring decisions is dependent on the opinion of only a select few people. Command and control depends on division.
Reminds me of how Psychiatrists have one if the highest suicide rates of all professions. Seems unusual; like an accountant who's insolvent, or a mechanics who's car always breaks down.
Nah, I'm a computer guy who's computers are never put together fully, as I don't want to mess with it when I get home. Happens all the time. Well, that's my desktop. My servers get TLC.
What is the cause of the unhealthy behavior in the first place?
Combination of culture and personal choice. e.g., A culture where it is permissible to take advantage of others as they are not as equal as your are. A personal choice to take advantage/abuse others as long as you get yours, screw everyone else.
I’ve been reading about microbiomes and things like that over the past year, and I suspect there’s a biological aspect to a lot of mental health issues in workplaces. Certainly the pandemic has renewed public interest in it, but I think to put it in caveman terms: sick people leave sick germs where they go.
I haven’t read this paper yet, but it looks pretty cool so far. The abstract certainly makes it seem worth the read.
We seem to think ourselves as further removed from meatspace than we really are. We’re a lot more like colonies of ants, I think. What attacks the ant, attacks the colony.
Oh well I didn’t say I thought it was mutually exclusive. Germs aren’t the only part of working a shit job. Whether it’s in person, over a video call, or over email, if your supervisor is a dickhead then your team will be unhappy.
I was thinking primarily about people who work indoors, in rooms with poor circulation. I’d wager those people are sicker more often, unwell more often, and obese more often. That’s all I meant.
Sounds like one of the best things to research and publish in order to help people. And, oh my god, this comment sounds like "just let sleeping dogs lie"...
Usually this goes like "don't hire the spreaders, and get rid of those who are already employed". It is very difficult and costly to actually help people, compared to make it not your problem - that's capitalism for ya.
That study reeks of corporate consulting and management. And it's out there now, research is going on about this.
The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators. That explains why it is not more likely to happen when the individual being hired is diagnosed ("Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis"), and also why it is more likely to happen when they enter a position of power ("The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.").
I am also not sure if the social contagion model has a lot of evidence for it. If you apply epidemiological models to any data you will get fits for epidemiological model parameters, and those will have a built-in epidemiological interpretation - but without prior knowledge that mental disorders are contagious (I thought most were definitely not?) you would just be making blind nonlinear curve fits to generic functions with many possible explanations.