Psychologists have advised people going through retrenchments that they should allow themselves time to grieve the loss of their employment and income.
However, they should not feel ashamed of losing their jobs since it’s beyond the individual’s control.
Thousands of employees are continuing to face the risk of unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic.
What to do when facing retrenchments:
Figures released by Statistics SA showed that the country’s unemployment rate jumped from 23.3% to 30.8% in the third quarter. South Africa’s unemployment rate increased by 7.5 percentage points in the third quarter of the year compared with the second quarter. This is the highest unemployment rate recorded since 2008.
SA’s unemployment rate increased to 30.8% in the third quarter:
According to psychologists, losing a job can have the same effect as losing a loved one through death or even a divorce.
Clinical Psychologist, Rafiq Lockhart, says if you are unprepared you get paralysed by the bad news.
“But the problem is where people get stuck, so they get stuck in anger or they get stuck in depression or they remain living in the fantasy that last minute somebody will rescue the situation because it has happened. But on average it doesn’t. So when we live in the fantasy expectation of at the last minute I will be rescued like in the movies, that’s dangerous. When we are stuck in anger, we are angry all the time, the only people who really suffer is our family and when we get stuck in depression then that’s also a bad thing.”
Job losses during the COVID-19 pandemic:
