Adulthood Employment Trajectories and Later Life Mental Health before and after the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: This life course study has two aims. First, to explore how diverse employment trajectories across adulthood are related to older people’s mental health in Chile, a country with no research in this field, and second, to analyze these associations before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods: We use data from the nationally-representative and longitudinal ‘Chilean Social Protection Survey’ sequence analysis to reconstruct employment trajectory types, and bivariate and multivariate analyses to measure their association with depressive symptoms. Results: Our findings indicate that formal labor force patterns in adulthood show the lowest burden of depressive symptomology before and after the onset of the overwhelming COVID-19 pandemic when controlling for traditional risk factors. Conclusion: We emphasize that policymakers in both the labor market and public health domains must consider the relationship between informal employment pathways in adulthood and poorer mental health in old age. Public policies should improve the conditions and quality of jobs during adulthood and promote more formalization in the labor market to address the high uncertainty involving low social protection, which is strongly associated with severe mental health problems in later life.