While I agree with the notion of occupation being beneficial to mental health I find this study as presented here to be highly flawed. (All of those flaws are pointed out in the paper and are not necessarily the autors fault.) I am a new found fan of this channel but must say that omitting these caveats has a (surely unintentionally) deceptive feel. Firstly I must disclaim that I only skimmed the paper itself and am absolutely not an expert on the topic. Some of the flaws I noticed: The study is heavily biased as it is performed in an environment where employment is scarce and thus likely unusual strongly connected to status and self importance. Also the alternative to employment is mostly ideling as opposed to self chosen hobbys or other occupations. Furthermore the offered employment conditions are absurdly ideal. I suppose that for unrestricted citizens having to perform hard labour in a wealthy nation the results would vary vastly. In my oppinion the study only shows how detremental to mental health being forced to do nothing is. Here is the final paragraph of the paper: "Finally, we underscore the interpretation of our findings as a proof of concept. The employment intervention we designed was a part-time activity, was not manual labor, was clerical, purposeful, and involved a relatively kind employer. These are features that are common to many, but far from all, jobs. Our findings instead encourage us to deepen our conception of ‘labor’ and ‘employment’ through future directions of questioning. Among them, which elements of the experience of employment may be most psychosocially valuable? In what contexts might material support alone be a suboptimal means of improving wellbeing? And how might the scarcity of meaningful activity or direction, so palpable in refugee camps but often encountered beyond, transform the concept of ‘time’ from a valuable resource into an amorphous and costly experience?"

All jobs aren't the same, here it's a seemingly useful and simple job that does not require real manual labor, it's only 2.5 hours a day and it's payed correctly. If they were offered a job going 10 hours a day with a pickaxe in a mine for half the pay it probably wouldn't have been the same. This should be kept in mind and mentioned in the video.

Cool paper, will cite it

good video

How was this study approved by the IRB?

Long awaited