Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Anecdotes abound about the mental health issues experienced by teachers. However, the sources, extent, and evolution of teachers’ mental health problems are poorly understood. We examine these questions using nationally representative longitudinal survey data. The project has two parts. The first documents how teachers’ mental health evolves over the life cycle. Here, we use repeated measures of teachers’ mental health at different ages to show how their mental health evolves through high school, college, teaching, retirement, and major life events such as marriage and childbearing. The second compares teachers’ mental health trajectories to those of other professionals. Here, we match teachers to ``similar’’ professionals in fields such as nursing who have the same gender, education, race, pre-college mental health, etc. Pre-employment measures of mental health and a matched comparison sample of non-teachers will speak to how teaching affects mental health. We address these questions using the nationally representative National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) 1979 cohort, which tracks individuals who were teenagers in 1979 through adulthood.