Depression is a prevalent mental disorder with severeconsequences. Studies have shown the 1-year prevalence rates of depression tobe as low as 0.6% and as high as 10.3%. Studies also show a mean lifetimeprevalence rate of 11.

7% however it is not clear how the difference inprevalence rates across various studies is actually due to prevalence ordifferences in depression measurements and reporting. The WHO lists depression as high on the list of mostdisabling of disorders, ranked at 5th place in 2008 and expected to move up to2nd place by 2020. Depression has been associated with higher riskof missing days of work, with the chances of missing work getting higher withthe severity of the disease. While the exact causes for depression are as yetunknown, it is thought that there are genetic, biological, psychosocial andsocio-economic contributions. Studies also show that anxiety disorders andminor depression might be precursors for major depression. This review utilizesa longitudinal study design to investigate the effect of psychosocial workingconditions on mental disorders such as depression.This paper describes work-related psychosocial stress factorsas aspects of the job such as work content, organization, relations that cangive rise to stress conditions characterized by ill health. Due to a variationin job types, psychosocial stressors in each job are different so the authorsof this paper used the Job Strain Modeldeveloped by Karasek et al.

and theEffort-reward Imbalance Model developed by Siegrist to analyze selected studies assessingdepression by a clinical diagnosis by a physician, a validated diagnosticinterview, conducted by a trained interviewer, or a validated rating scale fordepression.Literature search was carried out using PubMed database usingsearch terms such as exposure, workload, work conditions, psychiatric amongothers. About 319 articles were culled and searched or corresponding studies.This study identified occupational psychosocial factors thatare associated with depression with the highest association being highpsychological demands and reduced social support.

However, the epidemiologicstudies included in this review were only measured a few years prior whichmakes it hard to draw conclusions as to the presence of the exposure at theonset of depression or the strength of the disorder in relation to the exposureeven though the studies show evidence for an association between some kinds ofpsychosocial strain and depression growth.For future studies, it is important to widen the scope ofmeasure of exposure factors to include otherpsychosocial working conditions, such as emotional demands and interpersonalconflicts which have been suggested as health-hazardous factors.Stronger basis on clinical diagnostic measures are needed for studies in otherconditions such as anxiety due to the fact that work-related psychosocial factors might have differentimpacts in different occupational settings.