12 jobs that can be damaging to your mental health

16.4 million work days were lost due to stress, anxiety and depression in the UK in 2024

21.2 was the average number of days’ absence for people with mental health problems

Eleos analysed their own data from over 10,000 people across the UK to find out which careers are met with the most mental health issues

Eleos is the UK’s first fully digital provider of protection insurance, offering easily accessible income protection and life insurance to millions of people who currently have no safety net. Since mental illness is now the most common cause of sick leave among the under 45s we decided to look at the problem in more detail.

During 2024, Eleos asked 10,287 people in 850 occupations: ‘Have you ever had any form of anxiety, depression, stress related condition, eating disorder or mental illness?’ 46% of people answered Yes.

Mental health is easier to talk about than it used to be. [Mind](https://www.mind.org.uk/about-us/our-policy-work/reports-and-guides/the-big-mental-health-report-2024/#:~=In England%2C it's estimated about,always or often' in 2024.)) estimates that every year 1 in 4 of us will experience poor mental health but does that figure show an increase in mental health problems or simply a growing readiness to acknowledge them? It may be a bit of both. We don’t know for sure.

What we do know is that, of the many reasons for poor mental health, the jobs we do can be a major cause. Eleos’s research into the mental health of people applying for income protection insurance reveals the occupations most likely to cause mental health issues. In many cases, money worries emerged as a significant contributor.

Most people enter the teaching profession because the want to make a positive difference. According to the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (now the NEU) this has been cited as the main motivation by 80% of teachers. But teachers are leaving the profession at the rate of 40,000 a year, which is 10% of the total workforce. The biggest reasons are the stress and burnout caused by workload and working conditions. The fact that our survey puts them at the top of the list for mental health problems bears this out. This is regrettable not only for the teachers themselves, who have undergone years of study, but also for the school children of today and tomorrow.

It seems that, despite being based in fairly comfortable environments, office-based jobs like accountant, financial adviser and admin worker can be seriously detrimental to your mental health. This is mostly due to the stress of the work and the pressure to perform, which is borne out by a report from The Mental Health Foundation on anxiety, burnout and depression.

Predictably, the hospitality sector ranks highly, with low wages, long hours and hard physical work. It seems that shop work, which shares similar working conditions, is just as stressful, a conclusion that’s supported by retail industry charity the Retail Trust. Exchanging the rat race for an ‘easy’ job on the checkout may not be such a good plan after all.

People don’t go into the caring professions like nursing, caring and social work for the money, but they fulfil essential roles in our society. However with levels of mental illness reaching almost 50% in these occupations, staff recruitment and retention may be at risk. According to the RCN, only a third of hospital shifts have the required number of nurses. Meanwhile the DfE has reassessed the risk of children’s social worker shortages from moderate to critical and there’s anecdotal evidence of people shunning the profession.

Tradespeople like plumbers, electricians and builders are often considered to be living the dream, but they appear at No 11 in our chart with 36% reporting mental ill health. A study from the National Library of Medicine drills down further, revealing the biggest cause of stress to be money worries (38%) followed by customer interactions (31%). Clearly the grass isn’t greener.

Parking at No 12 in the chart are the nation’s drivers, 35% of whom report mental health problems. It’s a profession that includes HGV drivers (300,000), delivery drivers (246,000), taxi drivers (381,000), uber and Bolt drivers (200,000) and bus or coach drivers (130,000). The freedom of the road might be the ideal, but the reality is clearly very different. The main stress factors are heavy schedules, tight deadlines and the complexities of navigating the UK’s road system, with its clogged streets and crumbling infrastructure.

If we look just outside the Top 12 we find factory works, bar staff and call centre workers, but our favourite finding of all is this: 86% of dog walkers experienced mental health problems. The number of respondents is so tiny that it has no statistical value, but it paints an intriguing picture.