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Ukip cleans up in a nationwide poll; Britain tops 1.4m zero-hours contracts; anti-depressant prescriptions soar. It might seem fanciful to wrap these three recent headlines in a single syndrome. But an age of anxiety is making itself felt in very disparate ways, and connections suggest themselves in diverse information, collected for different purposes. Blackpool, the seaside town where more anti-depressant prescriptions were written in 2013 than anywhere else in England, had a year earlier notched up one of the country's lowest scores in the Office for National Statistics happiness database.
The economic insecurity underlying this anxiety takes many forms. Zero-hours contracts are only the start; there is also "perma-temping", under-employment and a boom in "self-employment", a last recourse of the desperate in work-starved regions that conceals a withering of staff jobs across the Midlands and the north. Such workers worry about where their next pay cheque is coming from, and sometimes finance themselves by securing debt against their home, exposing their family as well as their working life to economic vicissitudes.
In talking to cash-strapped families across Britain, from Edinburgh to Essex, for a new book, Hard Times, we discovered how all of this has conspired to cast a shadow of worry across daily life. Asked to identify their "darkest fears", some individuals talked about major life events. Financing old age was a common concern ("Whoops – don't want to think about that, because it's too scary," said one man); a 50-year-old woman feared being made homeless; a younger one felt spooked by the thought of starting a family ("just thoughts like having a child, how on earth would you have enough money?").
Other "darkest fears" involved specific budgetary strains: gas and electricity, an "essential" car packing up, or being "haunted" by worries about the fridge breaking down. Even the water bill, the cheapest and most essential of the utilities, was offered by a man in London as the single thing that "really frighten[s] me".
Some of these voices were from people out of work, reflecting the well-established psychological toll of . But others were employed, and it is not easy to guess which: those dramatic phrases about fearing homelessness and broken fridges came from the working insecure, not the unemployed. The wellbeing data – in which David Cameron was briefly interested – suggests that roughly half the misery of those who are unemployed for a spell is shared with others who are under-employed, or struggling to cope financially for other reasons.
The connection between economic exposure and anxiety is exceptionally close. YouGov/Cambridge polling, conducted for the Guardian last year, revealed that 82% of those who reported that Britain's recent economic difficulties had hit them "a great deal" also acknowledged feeling anxious more often than five years ago, compared with just 21% of those who had come through the slump unscathed.
The dangers to individuals show up in the suicide figures. While there is much more than economics going on in the numbers, there was a definite spike in 2011, just as the labour market hit rock bottom; for men, in particular, there was an increasing concentration in depressed economic zones. More often, and less dramatically, rising anxiety can warp relations with others.
Those hit by economic adversity are twice as likely as others to confess to YouGov that they argue more with their family. At the same time, people hit by hard times become more reticent about engaging with the wider community.
The best data suggests volunteering collapsed when recession hit, contractingshrinking by about a fifth – twice as much as the economy – and this is true not just of involvement in organised groups, but even of exchanging favours between neighbours. It is no surprise if communities feel increasingly insecure.
Volunteering seems to have bounced back across Britain as a whole, but it cannot be assumed that this will be true everywhere. In more deprived boroughs, where volunteering started out lower, it fell several times faster during the downturn.
Meanwhile, in places where people are kept afloat by tax credits and housing benefit payments, the proclaimed private-sector recovery has been sapped by a policy of public austerity. Comparing, say, Yorkshire with London in the official output data reveals a northern recession that was not only deeper but more persistent. And while the rate of unemployment again fell across most of the country in this month's figures, they pointed to a rise in joblessness of 0.3 percentage points in the north-east over the most recent quarter.
Recoveries tend to reach most towns in the end, but as public provision is hacked away there are reasons to doubt that the tide of anxiety that rose with the recession will subside as it recedes.
In Britain, the self-rated wellbeing of those made redundant has tended to bounce back more or less completely, as soon as they land a new job. In contrast, in the United States – where ultra-flexible hiring and firing and minimal welfare have long been the norm – equivalent surveys find that the misery that comes with a redundancy notice lingers even after a new job has been found.
With stagnant wages and rampant insecurity in so much of Britain set to be compounded by the snatching back of state handouts for years to come, the new anxiety could become entrenched – a thought to make anyone who cares about the state of the nation very afraid.
Tom Clark is the author of Hard Times: The Divisive Toll of the Economic Slump
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