Cope with stress using exercise and your social network; don't allow your job to dictate your self-worth.

Don't let the effects of unemployment on your psyche linger even after you're working again.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—A new study finds that unemployment causes depression, which, based on today's unemployment figures, is not something that 10.2 percent of Americans need to be told. More surprising, says Krysia Mossakowski, PhD, assistant professor in the department of sociology at the University of Miami and author of the study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, is that symptoms of depression and unemployment can be directly linked years later.

THE DETAILS: Mossakowski analyzed data collected by the National Longitudinal Study of Youth from 1979 to 1994. The respondents in the study were between the ages of 14 and 22 at the beginning of the study, and 29 to 37 at the end. She tracked the duration of all periods of unemployment among the group between 1979 and 1993, and then compared those with the number of depressive symptoms reported in 1992 and 1994. About 5 percent of the sample had experienced unemployment, which averaged just under 18 months (though those months may have not been consecutive) across the 14-year period. Unemployment had a significant effect on reports of depressive symptoms, she found, and the length of prior unemployment was also a good predictor of the number of depressive symptoms reported in 1994. These effects were seen even after controlling for socioeconomic background, education levels, income, and demographics.

WHAT IT MEANS: Being unemployed can have long-lasting effects on your psychological health, says Mossakowski. "Depressive symptoms can reoccur throughout your life, even if they don't reach that level of clinical depression," she says. "That can affect social functioning in a different way, and it can affect work roles." Particularly distressing, she says, is that clinical depression generally manifests itself during young adulthood. "For young people, a marker of adulthood is employment," she adds. "You hope to get that dream job, and it becomes part of who you are." She hopes her research will help in getting programs established that help young people find work, especially at a time when reliable standbys like retail and restaurant jobs are scarce, and colleges and universities are cutting career-counseling services due to budget constraints.

Here are some ways to cope with the psychological fallout of unemployment in today's struggling economy: