Overview
- A Harvard-led team published a peer-reviewed paper in Science showing that occupations able to be done from home saw large rises in contact-free workdays and in measures of loneliness and psychological distress.
- The researchers used five representative US surveys covering 2011–2024 and an occupation-based comparison to limit selection bias and isolate the effect of working from home.
- They estimate that the shift to homeworking explains about one third of the pandemic-era rise in US mental-health complaints and report worse Kessler-6 scores plus higher use of psychotherapy and prescriptions for antidepressant and anxiety drugs among remote-capable workers.
- Key behavioral findings include that 84% of homeoffice days involved no human contact compared with 23% of office days and that people who live alone average an additional no-conversation day every two weeks, an 83% rise from before the pandemic.
- The authors do not call for a blanket return to offices; they recommend employers actively design hybrid arrangements to preserve social ties for those most at risk and experts note the findings are relevant to countries like Germany where remote work remains common.