This is a shamefully bad paper hyped up to make Science relevant but with a result that has no relationship at all to what's even in the title, never mind abstract.

The sad part is, this is going to be used to hurt workers everywhere! Come back to work for your own mental health.

They don't compare remote vs non-remote workers. They compare workers in job families that could be remote vs workers in job families that are unlikely to be remote. Their control group is nonsense, the pandemic affected people in different job families very differently.

The real effect is living alone or not.

Also, it conflates mental health utilization with mental health status. It makes it seem like not taking antidepressants means you aren't depressed. Maybe the actual lesson is that people in remote-capable jobs have better insurance and time to get antidepressants. And those that aren't, get to suffer with their bad mental health.

This paper says absolutely nothing about the impact of remote work on workers. Zero.

> They spent entire days without human contact and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely

You simply can't end an abstract/"editor's summary" with this kind of phrase when your whole field for decades has claimed seeking care and treatment is encouraged and should be viewed as positive. Although I understand they're used as proxy measurements, I can't take seriously a publication so careless in how it expresses itself.

Yeah. Compare mental health of those with families in remote vs non-remote work and it might flip entirely.

It is valuable though to point out that loneliness is a real issue and remote work could exacerbate that.

For my part, being forced to sit in an open office with chatter all around me is much worse for my mental health than the peace and quiet of my own home.

There's a reason people look at the institutions that a study comes from. In this case it's:

* Federal Reserve Bank of New York

* Department of Economics, University of Virginia

* Department of Economics, Harvard University

They're not doing anything to help the reputation of economics and economists.