Nationwide study flags depression and anxiety among China's delivery workers

As delivery platforms embed themselves in everyday life in China, a nationwide study recently published in China CDC Weekly has raised fresh concerns about depression and anxiety among the workers behind these services.

Researchers analyzed survey data collected in 2022 from 30,670 platform delivery workers across China's 31 provincial-level regions, including 11,402 food delivery riders and 19,268 goods couriers aged 18 to 58. Across the sample, 22.7 percent met the threshold for depressive symptoms and 10.4 percent for symptoms of anxiety.

The occupational comparison showed a gap: 26.6 percent of food delivery riders met the depressive-symptom threshold, compared with 20.4 percent of couriers. The corresponding figures for anxiety symptoms were 12.2 percent and 9.4 percent.

Food delivery riders also scored significantly higher on all 16 individual items across the two questionnaires, indicating that the difference extended across a broad range of symptoms.

The researchers went beyond total scores by network analysis, mapping connections among 16 symptoms.

Motor disturbance (noticeably slowed movement or speech, or unusually restless activity) was the most interconnected symptom in both groups, meaning it had the strongest overall connections with other symptoms in the network.

Uncontrollable worry was also central among food delivery riders, while fatigue ranked highly among couriers, the study said.

The analysis also identified symptoms that formed the strongest statistical links between the depression and anxiety clusters. Suicide ideation, including thoughts of death or self-harm, was the strongest bridging symptom among food delivery riders. Among couriers, nervousness was the leading bridging symptom, followed by suicide ideation.

The researchers said the different patterns found in the study supported the need for psychological preventive interventions tailored to each group's working conditions and symptom profiles.

However, the cross-sectional study could not track how symptoms developed over time or establish cause and effect. The researchers also said that the analysis included only a limited range of factors and did not incorporate sampling weights or survey-design effects.

According to a February report by People's Daily, China had about 12 million on-demand delivery workers, including food delivery and instant-delivery workers.