I would think ER room doctors/nurses, veterinary staff, first responders – the ones who see the worst of humanity up close and personal but are expected to remain professional in the most abhorrent situations imaginable.
I’m gonna throw it out there that it’s probably gonna be front counter at a busy fast food restaurant especially during rush hour and depending on location you can get really abusive people.
EG: Macca’s, hungry jacks, KFC.
Otherwise probably emergency services and the military…
Those poor souls who have to clean up crime scenes, oh and anyone who works as a legal content screener for social media sites to hide the horrible shit
Anything in a nursing home. It was the most depressing job I ever had. I would become friends with a lot of the residents only to come in the next morning and find out they died over night. Then you had to put in the brave and happy face for eight hours
The kind that constantly move the bar for satisfactory work.
The ones that pay little. Have no set schedule, and offer no safety or security.
Ones that don’t allow for vacation whether due to prohibitively low wages or forced overtime and no time off.
Basically anything that makes you feel like you are constantly moving backwards, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, hope for retirement or ever getting to enjoy life because you can barely afford to make it through your shift between rent/travel/food.
Restaurants. Long hours; always on your feet. And the ever growing demands from the public predominately affluent ones. They’re the only ones in today’s economy that can afford the premium on food.
Little to no social life, high odds on turning into an addict of some sort – cigarettes or alcohol, and hating everyone around you – staff & the public alike.
It’s vicious as you’re essentially a conscripted soldier in battle between the staff and the public.
Even if you never see an active war zone – the type of work/scheduling will almost certainly destroy your body, mental health and actively deteriorate all of your relationships. It’s just a toxic environment imo.
Then if you do see a war zone, you’re bound to see some horrible things.
Accounting. The overtime and burnout during financial year end is INSANE.
It was also mentally taxing working for a Real Estate Investment Trust. Soulless corporations trying to evict as many people as possible from their homes so they can raise rents.
Being an accountant for an REIT was the worst experience of my life.
Being a musician isn’t great, ebb and flow feast and famine of gigs, time on the road, poor sleep and diet schedules, free bar tabs at venues, lots of issues can easily pile up.
911 call takers. In the City where I worked FD, EMS and PD had separate call takers. FD could send help. EMS could send help and give medical advice and even walk through delivering a baby. PD was always the absolute worst day of someone life. Never, ever a good call. They burnt out much faster than the other services.
I would think social workers, paramedics, moderators for like facebook that have to remove certain types of content, those working in CPS, 911 dispatchers
Retail. Listening to the same songs over and over and over again. Most people can tell you what songs were big while they worked retail cause they heard them 1000’s of times
I was a missionary for 1year. I have extreme depression and anxiety from working with the “Christians” on my team. It broke my heart and challenged my world view. I still follow Christ, but I don’t have much to do with Christians, at least the American ones. It’s thirty years later and I am still not the person I was.
I wouldn’t compare the stress to what doctors and nurses go through, but personally speaking, cooking for ten years definitely takes its toll on you. Not to mention the drugs and alcohol
Funeral Director/Mortician. Jesus Criminy it nearly broke me for reals. I still dream about some of the cases, and I left the business over 10 years ago.
Early Childhood Education. Being a teacher aide was fun, but running a pre-k program post-covid? Not fun at all. The kids are intelligent, but they’re also very emotionally immature. All that one on one time with well to do parents that pretty much NEVER SAID NO to anything makes the experience unbearable. Low pay, burnout, parents that make my yearly income in a month get bullied by their own kids. Kill me now.
Call centers. Not necessarily the job. But the people who work there.
They often will hire anyone because of high turnover and do a subpar job of drug testing (if they do at all). So this basically means the worst of the worst are there with you.
Quite a few times per month at my specific center someone is either arrested, or an ambulance is called because they’ve overdosed on the toilet in the handicapped single bathroom.
Once a shooting threat was called in and no one was evacuated besides the higher ups. We only knew about it because there were sheriffs outside at quitting time.
Often people only stay through training so they can make a quick buck. Which screws the rest of everyone else on the floor because high call volumes. You can’t leave until the queue is empty.
Unfortunately these are the only decent paying jobs in my area of the US. And I can’t afford to go back to college to do anything worthwhile with my life. Yay me.
Definitely medical field and 1st responders (cops, firemen, paramedics, social workers). I’ve driven home, 30 minutes away, feeling drunk due to anxious breathing from a nursing job. Not enough help, appreciation, or recognition for us.
Trucking…. not only do we get labeled as low lifestyle, but alot of times were first on scene… it’s always the worst when it’s kids or a family that’s smeared on the rd.
Probably not the worst, but teaching is up there. All day long you’re surrounded by emotions, every type. I’m a high school teacher, so the hormones and emotions are a lot. On top of that, so many kids have horrible things going on outside of school, and you will often hear about it. I’ve had to call CPS an unfortunate amount of times. It takes a toll on you, and I usually don’t have time to deal with my own emotions or mental health, and always go home worrying about different kids.
Incoming call centers. It’s terrible. You get insulted regularly and even threatened.
I worked for an insurance company once. I remember one guy called to cancel his insurance. Before doing so, I just confirmed that he wanted to cancel insurance X and not insurance Y (just so I cancel the right thing and he doesn’t have to call back). He went straight to saying that he will find me and break my teeth in. 😱 calm down man. I don’t care. I just want you to clear this business in one call and not have to call multiple times. It happened way too often.
I left this job with a broken soul and a hate for people. I avoid conflict. Even after 10 years, I still have panic attacks when I hear a Karen abusing an employee in the wild. Work in IT now.
Hairdresser here. I’ve worked in high stress, high stakes corporate environments. This is worse. People dump on you constantly, you’re expected to create art and entertain them while it’s happening, and you make (on average) far below a livable wage.
A district manager for a pizza chain turned out to be my worst job ever for my mental health. 70 hour weeks, no employees, and the ones I had were burned out… Covid ruined it! It was never great but that made it unbearable. Somehow three times to rehab later and the only major change I made was my job, it gave me the space to reset!
Case managers and social workers. My mom was a case manager for kids whose parents were going through contentious divorces, it was so awful that she developed PTSD and was forced into early retirement.
Gonna throw a curve ball into the thread and say front line IT. Been doing it for a long time and have seen 3 deaths, multiple hospitalizations, and rampant alcohol and drug abuse.
Slaughterhouses: Doing physically demanding and dangerous or repetitive work at high speeds in an extremely cold or extremely hot environment with blood and guts everywhere. Also they hire anyone so the guy standing next to you might be a normal dude, or he might be on parole for murder or rape.
Police Officer in a high crime area: constantly having to deal with literally the worst elements and dysfunction in society.
Emergency Room: Having to deal with seeing people with horrible injuries and trying to save their lives. Seeing children die, etc. I think would be extremely difficult.
I’ve done some work in the anti-poaching field in parts of East and South Africa. We’ve come across rhinos that were slaughtered for their horn that had explosives left underneath them to kill the anti-poaching units that are trying to track the poachers. It’s a dark window into human greed and senseless cruelty.
Worst job I ever had was during college. For a couple of semesters I worked part and sometimes full time at a call center for a well-known cellphone company and my job was taking calls from people who had questions about their bills or had some problem with their service.
About 50% of the calls were from rude people acting like assholes and demanding all kinds of shit and threatening to sue, and their problem usually was that they hadn’t paid their bill for a month or two and that’s why their cellphone didn’t work, or they were trying to scam the company and get free shit by pulling the “the customer is always right, let me talk to your manager because I’m angry because of reasons” card.
Then about 30% of the calls were from people who were royally pissed off about something and they had varying reasons why they were at least partly right in being pissed off but they were huge assholes about it nonetheless and took it out on us despite the fact that we were trying to fix their problem.
The remaining 20% of the calls were people who had some problem, self-inflicted or otherwise, but acted like normal human beings and accepted when they were wrong or thanked you when you fixed their problem when it was the company who was wrong.
Say we took about 50 calls every day over our eight hour shift, that means that six out of seven days a week I took something like 40 calls from raging assholes yelling at me and insulting me. That’s 240 calls by people yelling at you and insulting you every week. That shit got old fast.
There’s certainly plenty of worse and more stressful jobs out there, but a lot of them pay much better than my old job to make up for the level of stress such a soul-destroying experience entails.
Nursing home or residential care for the elderly would be pretty bad. I was in domiciliary care in 2023, for 3 months. One of them wound up passing away due to sepsis, and I still believe I was to blame.
The armed forces can be pretty bad on the mental health, too. And emergency medical staff.
Anything dealing with vulnerable populations. ERs, nursing homes, CPS, low income housing, advocacy groups, etc.
It is very difficult to deal with human suffering on a regular basis and not have it affect you. And if you’re American, counseling isn’t always available thanks to insurance.
I would guess customer service. I’ve done customer service jobs and I have had a customer actually take a swing at me for matters beyond my control (I’ve been punched three times at work in my life, I am not a people person). Then you have the fucking managers who don’t make things any easier. No Dave, I am not working late because you fired the cashier. No Dave, I can not come in on my day off, it is my day off and I have plans and it doesn’t matter what those plans are, I am not breaking them for you.
My last job was really terrible because our customers were retail store managers. Want to know the biggest bunch of babies on the planet? Retail store managers. Last month I was told to drop everything around 1pm, drive almost 5 hours away to replace a self checkout printer because the store was bitching about it, the local techs didn’t have a printer, and the president of that retail chain was demanding that we prioritize this tiny little store in the middle of fucking no where and I was told that it didn’t matter what I had planned that night, this had to be done.
Comments
agriculture, construction, and mining have the highest suicide rates, so probably those
Mental health workers/social workers
content moderators
Apparently? Veterinarian. They have a ridiculously high suicide rate when compared to other health care workers.
I would think ER room doctors/nurses, veterinary staff, first responders – the ones who see the worst of humanity up close and personal but are expected to remain professional in the most abhorrent situations imaginable.
I’m gonna throw it out there that it’s probably gonna be front counter at a busy fast food restaurant especially during rush hour and depending on location you can get really abusive people.
EG: Macca’s, hungry jacks, KFC.
Otherwise probably emergency services and the military…
Hospitality… there is a reason people who work in restaurants all have additions
City kill shelters, Case Managers
Those poor souls who have to clean up crime scenes, oh and anyone who works as a legal content screener for social media sites to hide the horrible shit
Maybe the flight control people
Teaching
Corrections
Anything in a nursing home. It was the most depressing job I ever had. I would become friends with a lot of the residents only to come in the next morning and find out they died over night. Then you had to put in the brave and happy face for eight hours
The kind that constantly move the bar for satisfactory work.
The ones that pay little. Have no set schedule, and offer no safety or security.
Ones that don’t allow for vacation whether due to prohibitively low wages or forced overtime and no time off.
Basically anything that makes you feel like you are constantly moving backwards, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel, hope for retirement or ever getting to enjoy life because you can barely afford to make it through your shift between rent/travel/food.
Military
If you have a soul: management of any sort.
Control freak managers
Nurses for sure. Every nurse probably has PTSD. I could write a whole page of reasons why.
Any job where you work nights. I swap from days to nights every two weeks. And the two week hitch on nights is always very very hard on me.
Site Reliability Engineers… lol
Anything that is night shift or rotating shifts.
ER nurses, suicide hotline workers, and social workers dealing with abusive trauma cases
Restaurant management, particularly chain quick service and fast casual ones.
Postal service
Anyone in healthcare. It’s taxing.
Trauma ER. Have you watched the Pitt!????
Dentists, research professors.
Human cannon ball must be pretty nerve wracking ?
CNA’s.
Being an animator sounds more soul crunching than anything.
Working in Dialysis
Restaurants. Long hours; always on your feet. And the ever growing demands from the public predominately affluent ones. They’re the only ones in today’s economy that can afford the premium on food.
Little to no social life, high odds on turning into an addict of some sort – cigarettes or alcohol, and hating everyone around you – staff & the public alike.
It’s vicious as you’re essentially a conscripted soldier in battle between the staff and the public.
Military is pretty horrible tbh.
Even if you never see an active war zone – the type of work/scheduling will almost certainly destroy your body, mental health and actively deteriorate all of your relationships. It’s just a toxic environment imo.
Then if you do see a war zone, you’re bound to see some horrible things.
right now? maybe stock market brokers. not the big guys on top, but the little guys on the bottom doing all the work.
All of them
I’d say anyone who works in customer service. Like they deal with people yelling and causing them out for things that aren’t their fault.
I’d say it’s probably CPS. I can’t imagine kid after kid getting yanked out of meth labs and motel brothels.
Dish crew at Texas Road House. DO NOT WORK THERE.
Healthcare
Anything 3rd shift from 11pm-11am !!!
I’d assume being a detective working child porn cases.
IT. Worst jobs in terms of expectations of knowledge as industry progresses at light speed pace.
Accounting. The overtime and burnout during financial year end is INSANE.
It was also mentally taxing working for a Real Estate Investment Trust. Soulless corporations trying to evict as many people as possible from their homes so they can raise rents.
Being an accountant for an REIT was the worst experience of my life.
Being a musician isn’t great, ebb and flow feast and famine of gigs, time on the road, poor sleep and diet schedules, free bar tabs at venues, lots of issues can easily pile up.
Customer facing casino jobs. The entitlement…
911 call takers. In the City where I worked FD, EMS and PD had separate call takers. FD could send help. EMS could send help and give medical advice and even walk through delivering a baby. PD was always the absolute worst day of someone life. Never, ever a good call. They burnt out much faster than the other services.
Software Engineering
Military
Anything that has to do with the army or serving the our country.
Therapists.
Nurses/doctors.
I would think social workers, paramedics, moderators for like facebook that have to remove certain types of content, those working in CPS, 911 dispatchers
Retail. Listening to the same songs over and over and over again. Most people can tell you what songs were big while they worked retail cause they heard them 1000’s of times
I was a missionary for 1year. I have extreme depression and anxiety from working with the “Christians” on my team. It broke my heart and challenged my world view. I still follow Christ, but I don’t have much to do with Christians, at least the American ones. It’s thirty years later and I am still not the person I was.
Veterinary medicine is pretty up there. Not just vets but the support staff, too.
Animal shelter/ rescue
Not the worst of all time but call centers definitely not good
Waiters
Medical jobs
I wouldn’t compare the stress to what doctors and nurses go through, but personally speaking, cooking for ten years definitely takes its toll on you. Not to mention the drugs and alcohol
Germaphobe honeydipper (cleans outhouses and septic tanks)
Funeral Director/Mortician. Jesus Criminy it nearly broke me for reals. I still dream about some of the cases, and I left the business over 10 years ago.
Early Childhood Education. Being a teacher aide was fun, but running a pre-k program post-covid? Not fun at all. The kids are intelligent, but they’re also very emotionally immature. All that one on one time with well to do parents that pretty much NEVER SAID NO to anything makes the experience unbearable. Low pay, burnout, parents that make my yearly income in a month get bullied by their own kids. Kill me now.
I would say emt if were measuring by salary to stress ratio. These people don’t get paid enough
Corrections Officers. To live amongst people that don’t belong in society destroys your views of the world.
Customer service/hospitality
The ones where you get to see the very worst of what humans can do to each other.
Police, paramedics and social workers.
Teachers get a rough time too – Having a four year old tell you about how “daddy bit mummy with a knife” takes its toll.
Call centers. Not necessarily the job. But the people who work there.
They often will hire anyone because of high turnover and do a subpar job of drug testing (if they do at all). So this basically means the worst of the worst are there with you.
Quite a few times per month at my specific center someone is either arrested, or an ambulance is called because they’ve overdosed on the toilet in the handicapped single bathroom.
Once a shooting threat was called in and no one was evacuated besides the higher ups. We only knew about it because there were sheriffs outside at quitting time.
Often people only stay through training so they can make a quick buck. Which screws the rest of everyone else on the floor because high call volumes. You can’t leave until the queue is empty.
Unfortunately these are the only decent paying jobs in my area of the US. And I can’t afford to go back to college to do anything worthwhile with my life. Yay me.
Definitely medical field and 1st responders (cops, firemen, paramedics, social workers). I’ve driven home, 30 minutes away, feeling drunk due to anxious breathing from a nursing job. Not enough help, appreciation, or recognition for us.
I think the ones that have you work M-F and sometimes weekends. And nights.
I’m pretty sure paramedics have a ridiculously high suicide rate
NeoNatal Intense Care Nurses
Slaughterhouse
Factory Farm workers, I’ve heard, have a pretty awful mental health effect
Law enforcement that must review CSA images. I think I read that is a very short term assignment due to the damage to their mental health.
Health care ( everyone who works in the medical field) , RETAIL !
Journalist chasing truth under deadline pressure
First responders
Management consulting is pretty bad.
Graveyard shift work
The ones where you’re inside sitting under fluorescent lighting all hours that the sun is out.
Trucking…. not only do we get labeled as low lifestyle, but alot of times were first on scene… it’s always the worst when it’s kids or a family that’s smeared on the rd.
Probably not the worst, but teaching is up there. All day long you’re surrounded by emotions, every type. I’m a high school teacher, so the hormones and emotions are a lot. On top of that, so many kids have horrible things going on outside of school, and you will often hear about it. I’ve had to call CPS an unfortunate amount of times. It takes a toll on you, and I usually don’t have time to deal with my own emotions or mental health, and always go home worrying about different kids.
Caregiving.
Health admin. NEVER AGAIN.
Nursing. Not too much of what we see which is usually horrible but from management and the things they do to us
Permanent nights screwed me up no end
Retail pharmacy 🙂 (:
Incoming call centers. It’s terrible. You get insulted regularly and even threatened.
I worked for an insurance company once. I remember one guy called to cancel his insurance. Before doing so, I just confirmed that he wanted to cancel insurance X and not insurance Y (just so I cancel the right thing and he doesn’t have to call back). He went straight to saying that he will find me and break my teeth in. 😱 calm down man. I don’t care. I just want you to clear this business in one call and not have to call multiple times. It happened way too often.
I left this job with a broken soul and a hate for people. I avoid conflict. Even after 10 years, I still have panic attacks when I hear a Karen abusing an employee in the wild. Work in IT now.
Any job that is your current employment.
911 Dispatch
Working in the mental health field
Hairdresser here. I’ve worked in high stress, high stakes corporate environments. This is worse. People dump on you constantly, you’re expected to create art and entertain them while it’s happening, and you make (on average) far below a livable wage.
A district manager for a pizza chain turned out to be my worst job ever for my mental health. 70 hour weeks, no employees, and the ones I had were burned out… Covid ruined it! It was never great but that made it unbearable. Somehow three times to rehab later and the only major change I made was my job, it gave me the space to reset!
The one that I have
Social work crisis response
Apparently being a veterinarian is harmful for one’s mental health. Sorry, I am unab to write more.
Call centers fucking suck. Probably not the worst, but they fucking suck.
Social work. Constant crisis. Little pay. Very little appreciation
Almost all of them
Jobs that don’t pay enough to survive on.
Caregiving
Customer service, receiving daily frustrations yet had to smile even though going on a silent breakdown
Sales is up there
Service industry.
The ones that fall on the days ending in Y
Cops. Look into life expectancy after retiring, its absurd. Besides depression, alcoholism, suicide, the divorce rates are through the roof.
Physicians
software engineer
Anything customer facing front line work.
The people that have to go through flagged content for things like CP or animal abuse on social media
Police and EMT’s have high suicide rates. Or many have PTSD.
Being a therapist can be one.
Case managers and social workers. My mom was a case manager for kids whose parents were going through contentious divorces, it was so awful that she developed PTSD and was forced into early retirement.
911 Operator and Dispatcher.
Soldiers who have seen combat. Many develop PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder).
Anywhere retail. (Customer Service)
Which*
Gonna throw a curve ball into the thread and say front line IT. Been doing it for a long time and have seen 3 deaths, multiple hospitalizations, and rampant alcohol and drug abuse.
One of my best friends works police dispatch and her mental health is gone.
I worked in healthcare. That’s my vote.
I bet working from home for the pentagon is such a drag
There are people whose job it is to watch all the video of horrendous child porn to try find clues to identify victims or perpetrators.
Any frontline/people-facing jobs!
Slaughterhouses: Doing physically demanding and dangerous or repetitive work at high speeds in an extremely cold or extremely hot environment with blood and guts everywhere. Also they hire anyone so the guy standing next to you might be a normal dude, or he might be on parole for murder or rape.
Police Officer in a high crime area: constantly having to deal with literally the worst elements and dysfunction in society.
Emergency Room: Having to deal with seeing people with horrible injuries and trying to save their lives. Seeing children die, etc. I think would be extremely difficult.
Pretty much anything that serves the public.
FBI CP investigator.
There are worse, but retail definitely wasn’t good on my mental health.
Oncologist.
Teaching
Call center agent drowning in scripts and stress
Military
First responders/ER staff
i was gonna say therapy/therapists. i’ve heard a lot of therapists need their own therapists because sometimes what they hear is just so bad
I’ve done some work in the anti-poaching field in parts of East and South Africa. We’ve come across rhinos that were slaughtered for their horn that had explosives left underneath them to kill the anti-poaching units that are trying to track the poachers. It’s a dark window into human greed and senseless cruelty.
Assembly worker. Doing the same action over and over will get to you. Trust me.
Being the person who monitors people peeing into cups for drug tests.
Anything veterinary related
Worst job I ever had was during college. For a couple of semesters I worked part and sometimes full time at a call center for a well-known cellphone company and my job was taking calls from people who had questions about their bills or had some problem with their service.
About 50% of the calls were from rude people acting like assholes and demanding all kinds of shit and threatening to sue, and their problem usually was that they hadn’t paid their bill for a month or two and that’s why their cellphone didn’t work, or they were trying to scam the company and get free shit by pulling the “the customer is always right, let me talk to your manager because I’m angry because of reasons” card.
Then about 30% of the calls were from people who were royally pissed off about something and they had varying reasons why they were at least partly right in being pissed off but they were huge assholes about it nonetheless and took it out on us despite the fact that we were trying to fix their problem.
The remaining 20% of the calls were people who had some problem, self-inflicted or otherwise, but acted like normal human beings and accepted when they were wrong or thanked you when you fixed their problem when it was the company who was wrong.
Say we took about 50 calls every day over our eight hour shift, that means that six out of seven days a week I took something like 40 calls from raging assholes yelling at me and insulting me. That’s 240 calls by people yelling at you and insulting you every week. That shit got old fast.
There’s certainly plenty of worse and more stressful jobs out there, but a lot of them pay much better than my old job to make up for the level of stress such a soul-destroying experience entails.
Nursing home or residential care for the elderly would be pretty bad. I was in domiciliary care in 2023, for 3 months. One of them wound up passing away due to sepsis, and I still believe I was to blame.
The armed forces can be pretty bad on the mental health, too. And emergency medical staff.
Veterinarians. There’s an entire movement to bring awareness to it #NOMV
Any job that isn’t self employed.
Federal jobs
professional eater
Anything dealing with vulnerable populations. ERs, nursing homes, CPS, low income housing, advocacy groups, etc.
It is very difficult to deal with human suffering on a regular basis and not have it affect you. And if you’re American, counseling isn’t always available thanks to insurance.
Paramedic here. Without a doubt, any first responder job has a massive impact.
domestic violence crisis center workers
I’m a 911 dispatcher, luckily I work for an agency that prioritizes mental health but the calls still take a toll. I see it in my coworkers as well.
Crab fishermen
Corrections and law enforcement
Law enforcement.
I would guess customer service. I’ve done customer service jobs and I have had a customer actually take a swing at me for matters beyond my control (I’ve been punched three times at work in my life, I am not a people person). Then you have the fucking managers who don’t make things any easier. No Dave, I am not working late because you fired the cashier. No Dave, I can not come in on my day off, it is my day off and I have plans and it doesn’t matter what those plans are, I am not breaking them for you.
My last job was really terrible because our customers were retail store managers. Want to know the biggest bunch of babies on the planet? Retail store managers. Last month I was told to drop everything around 1pm, drive almost 5 hours away to replace a self checkout printer because the store was bitching about it, the local techs didn’t have a printer, and the president of that retail chain was demanding that we prioritize this tiny little store in the middle of fucking no where and I was told that it didn’t matter what I had planned that night, this had to be done.
This is the first week of my new job.
Full time caregiver for my mom who has end stage dementia. I’ve been doing it for over 5 years & my mental health is shot!! 😫😫
Probationary employees in the federal government.
Any job that serves people. Health, retail first responders, social workers. Man, they are just trying to help and all they get is the shit.