A New Kind of Grief: Job Loss and Mental Health
Job security has been a steady source of anxiety across Ontario this past year. On-again, off-again tariff threats have led to thousands of jobs lost in manufacturing, agriculture, and retail. In post-secondary education, chronic provincial underfunding combined with federal changes to international student policy has led to mass layoffs— with a staggering 10,000 jobs lost province-wide.
This has been felt most acutely here in Kitchener-Waterloo, where Conestoga College has cut 2,558 jobs since September 2024. Full disclosure (a rarity for a therapist): I was laid off by the college at the end of the summer, so I have first-hand experience.
I was invited to speak at Conestoga’s faculty union town hall on December 18 — two days after 181 faculty received layoff notices, and just hours after another 197 support staff were let go — to share my thoughts about the mental health impact of job loss, both as a psychotherapist and someone who has lived it. I’ve adapted and edited those thoughts (i.e. I've added arguably too many Gabor Maté quotes) to share here.
If you’ve lost your job, or are living in fear of it, I hope you find this helpful.
If you need support, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
No Quick Fixes
What we’re going through is heartbreaking, shocking, overwhelming, and traumatic. I wish I could tell you there was some sort of quick fix to help you feel better, but having lived through job loss and been surrounded by others going through it as well, it’s clear that this is a uniquely complex and painful experience. The truth is, there are no easy answers or short cuts through the pain we’re feeling, and - if you're like me - you probably can't stomach platitudes or silver linings right now anyways.
However, there's a concept simply called, “name it to tame it.” It's the idea that our emotions can feel vast, overwhelming, and unbearable, but once we put language to them, or give them a name, they become more containable, and a little more manageable. If nothing else, I hope this helps you to name your feelings a bit more clearly.
My layoff journey started on a Tuesday in June, when I was told my job was safe. That Friday I learned my position was being eliminated. My layoff notice finally came through at exactly 5 pm on the last Wednesday in August.
I had dreaded this for months. We’ve all spent the past year working in the midst of uncertainty and upheaval across the province, and in our school. We’ve come into work day after day not knowing what has happened, who has been laid off, or what will happen next, which has created a psychologically unsafe environment.
One of my colleagues described the experience as, “a new kind of grief.”
“As cherished colleagues were slowly being let go, the work became lonelier,” she said. “It became hard to get excited about anything because you just didn't know if you or your collaborator would still be employed a few weeks down the line.”
In his book, When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, Gabor Maté says this: “The research literature has identified three factors that universally lead to stress: uncertainty, the lack of information and the loss of control.” (p. 34)
We've lived through all three of these conditions for months. As my colleague said, “you just didn’t know” - we’ve never known what's happening, and we've never had any information, certainty, or control over the situation. At this point, no one knows how many rounds of layoffs there have been – we haven’t been told, and we’ve also lost count.
So naturally, our nervous systems have been on high alert for months, making us physiologically less able to be present, relaxed, and focused. There is no doubt this impacted our health, our work, and ultimately our students, long before any of us received notices.
That was the case for me - and it got worse.
Impacts
Being laid off will impact us all differently. “The executive whose financial security is assured when he is terminated may still experience severe stress if his self-esteem and sense of purpose were completely bound up with his position in the company, compared with a colleague who finds greater value in family, social interests or spiritual pursuits,” Maté says. “There is no uniform and universal relationship between a stressor and the stress response.” (p. 31)
Everyone is unique so your experience may be different from mine, but I imagine there are a lot of similarities.
The anxiety was immediately overwhelming. Job loss creates an ocean of uncertainty, which is jet fuel for anxiety. It thrives on it. I had countless sleepless nights, and too many days consumed by worry about money, about my career, and all the countless potential practical and personal impacts of being let go.
Being laid off also had a huge impact on my confidence, a common symptom of job loss in our culture. “All too frequently, people are given the sense that they are valued only for their utilitarian contribution and are expendable if they lose their economic worth,” Maté says. (p. 224)
When you’re deemed disposable, and treated like little more than a line item, it’s easy to question your own self-worth, abilities, and value. For me, this has been incredibly painful and depressing. This could also lead to big, uncomfortable questions of identity. Taking pride in your role, and having it taken away is destabilizing. You may even be wondering if this will lead to an unplanned and unwanted career change.
Most of all, losing my job has led to a huge amount of grief. Like many of us, I have a closet full of five dollar t-shirts from the bookstore and expected to retire here. We were fully committed to this school, and we are now grieving the loss of jobs we loved, the loss of our communities, and the loss of the futures we thought we had. Staff are grieving the fact that they will not be able to finish projects they started, or see students they supported graduate. The cruel irony is that the more we cared and the more committed we were, the more loss we will feel.
Through it all I’ve felt stunned, angry, furious, anxious, hopeless, and depressed - all the emotions that typically come with grief. My capacity has sometimes been shockingly low, which means the impact spread to my family, and my kids. Grief and hypervigilance can do this – they both have a significant limiting impact on our cognitive capacities and memory. We need to expect this and be gentle with ourselves when it happens. But I hate how this impacted the people I love most.
Finally, there are also potential long-term health consequences. “Multiple job losses have been shown to raise the risk of heart attacks as much as cigarettes, alcohol, and hypertension,” Maté says in The Myth of Normal. “Even the fear of losing one’s job is just as strong a predictor of an older person’s health as it actually happening.” (p. 282)
In a Perfect World…
You may experience all of these impacts. You might experience others. If you’re lucky, you won’t go through any. But it’s clear that the potential damage caused by losing your job can be complex, devastating, and long lasting.
This isn’t surprising - other than your partner, no one has a bigger impact on your mental health than your boss. What's more, as author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant says, mass layoffs do an enormous amount of damage to a company’s culture, reputation, and bottom line, especially when little consideration is given to how to treat people throughout the process.
So in a perfect world, employers would place a higher priority on the mental health of their staff when making these decisions. In a perfect world, companies would see that prioritizing staff’s mental health is not a luxury or a perk, but actually in the best interest of the organization, and essential for the sustainability and future of any institution. In other words, in a perfect world, corporations would see that taking care of employees’ mental health is not just the right and moral thing to do, but the smart and strategic thing too.
But clearly, we don’t live in a perfect world. So it’s up to us to prioritize our health and well being if we want to get through this.
Wherever you’re at, you’re not broken, and you’re not sick. Your body, nervous system, and brain are all responding appropriately to a horrible situation you did not cause, deserve, or ask for. You owe it to yourself and the people around you to aggressively take care of yourself so you can approach whatever comes next with as much confidence, and as clear a head as possible.
There are things we know can help. Staying physically active is one of the best defenses against anxiety and depression. Mindfulness practices and grounding skills can help reduce anxiety and stress, and give us some space from the worries that may be taking over. Deep breathing - where we breathe in for a count of three, and out for a count of six - slows down our heart rate, and sends a signal to our nervous systems and bodies that we are safe, and we can relax. And though we’re by no means powerless, the reality is we individually have limited control in this situation. Focusing on what we can control and letting go of what we can't, can make a huge difference.
These tools can make a big difference, but again, there are no quick fixes - your pain is there for a reason. Your emotions contain information, pointing to what you need and how to plot your next steps. Anger may be telling you to fight back, to advocate for yourself and your co-workers. Depression may be inviting you to connect with friends and family, and do things that will rebuild your confidence. Self-doubt and despair may be a signal to re-evaluate how much of your self-worth and value has been placed in your work. Anxiety may be a sign to start taking active steps towards finding new work. Grief needs space and time to be felt, processed, and expressed. All of these emotions point us towards our values, and identifying and staying connected with what’s important to us is essential in times of crisis.
This is going to look different for each one of us, so seeking support is crucial.
As Frank Anderson of the Trauma Institute says, “the solution to a toxic work environment is connection.” This is true whether or not you've been laid off. Lean on your family, your friends, and your colleagues who are going through this with you. Take advantage of the supports and resources you have. Meeting with my therapist has been pivotal as it’s given me a place to feel and process my emotions, to be validated, to be heard, and to start talking back to some of the toxic self-doubt that had been so loud since June. My hope is that you can be supported in the same way.
One last thing - the reality of grief is that it comes and goes. Grief doesn’t leave us, it evolves. It becomes less intense and less frequent over time, but can pop up again at a moment’s notice. When I heard about the latest rounds of layoffs this week, it all came flooding back to me. I am sincerely heartbroken and angry for those of you that are going through this. This is hard, and will probably be hard for a while - there is a long road ahead of us. But support is available to help you navigate and get through this.
