Overworked, Vacation-Starved America Ranks #1 in Depression, Mental Health Problems

By Silja J.A. Talvi, In These Times. Posted November 13, 2008.

Jack Torrance, Jack Nicholson's character in the 1980 film The Shining, should get credit for popularizing (and making terrifying) a proverb that dates as far back as the mid-1600s: "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Nicholson's character sure looked like he could have used a vacation before his psyche disintegrated and he went on a murderous rampage.

In the real world, the danger isn't that we'll start obsessively and repeatedly typing proverbs at the Overlook Hotel before taking an ax to the door (one would hope), but that our country's hard-working denizens will keep getting sicker, sadder, less productive and more miserable.

Medical and poll-based evidence indicates that we seriously need relief. Work-related stress can lead to sudden heart attacks, obesity, anxiety and depression. A World Health Organization and Harvard Medical School study last year put the United States at the top of the list of depressed (or otherwise mentally disordered) countries, while the Gallup Daily Happiness-Stress Index finds that the only consistent upswing in mood occur when Americans get some time off on the weekends or holidays.

As John de Graaf, executive director of the Seattle-based advocacy group Take Back Your Time, puts it, Americans are "time-starved and vacation-starved."

Americans put in more hours at work than any other nation, surpassing even the workaholic Japanese. We average nine more weeks of labor per year than our working counterparts in Western Europe, who get at least 20 paid days of vacation each year.

Finland tops the list of vacation-supporting industrialized nations with 30 paid vacation days per year after the first year of work, plus 14 paid national holidays, according to a July 2007 report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. (This is in addition to the possibility that the country might soon grant "love holidays" so that some couples can rekindle passions and have kids.)

Canada and Japan are near the bottom of that list, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days, while the United States has the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation that does not have a mandatory minimum of vacation time. In fact, out of the world's 195 independent countries, 137 have some kind of vacation/annual leave legislation in place.

Each year, de Graaf and his U.S. and Canadian colleagues work to get the word out about their annual celebration, Take Back Your Time Day, which occurs Oct. 24.

De Graaf, an independent filmmaker with a long, impressive list of social consciousness-raising documentaries under his belt -- including the popular PBS documentaries Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza -- explains that he started Take Back Your Time to "challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time-famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."

De Graaf says that the Obama camp responded with "definite interest," although he can't yet share specifics. De Graaf considers time-famine -- and the need for mandatory vacation time for all Americans -- a bipartisan issue, although he says he's aware that Republicans are more likely to object to national legislation.

Even some Democrats, he admits, think he is over-dramatizing the situation: Aren't there more pressing social justice issues for us to worry about? Poverty, healthcare and ethnic/gender disparities, to name a few?

"I've been told by a few prominent progressive activists that, while they're personally supportive of what we're trying to accomplish, they're not willing to get involved because this is really a white, middle-class issue," he says. " 'You couldn't be more wrong,' is what I tell them."

In July, Take Back Your Time released its findings from a scientific telephone sample of more than 1,000 U.S. adults. The poll revealed that more than two-thirds (69 percent) of Americans would support the passage of a paid vacation law. Most enthusiastic about vacation-time-legislation were people under 35 (83 percent); African Americans (89 percent); Latinos (82 percent); people earning low incomes (82 percent); women (75 percent, versus 63 percent for men); and families with children (74 percent).

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Silja J.A. Talvi is an investigative journalist and the author of Women Behind Bars: The Crisis of Women in the U.S. Prison System (Seal Press: 2007). Her work has already appeared in many book anthologies, including It's So You (Seal Press, 2007), Prison Nation (Routledge: 2005), Prison Profiteers (The New Press: 2008), and Body Outlaws (Seal Press: 2004). She is a senior editor at In These Times.

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