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Work-life challenges experienced by employees navigating pregnancy, maternity, and parenting young children are well documented in the literature. Correspondingly, work-life balance policies and provisions aimed at supporting affected staff are well established in many modern organizations. Within this agenda however, complications within maternity journeys, and specifically the intersection with mental health has been neglected. In this chapter, we consider the work-life issues associated with perinatal (pregnancy and post-birth) mental illness. After introducing perinatal mental illness, and its impact on individuals and families, we consider the two-way relationship between illness and work: how employment factors influence the development of perinatal mental illness and recovery trajectories, with implications for family life; and how such illnesses impact work and employment. We offer key insights from our empirical research on this topic in the context of UK policing, highlighting challenges linked to the nature of police work and organization culture, and issues that are more broadly applicable to how maternity and mental illness are treated in the workplace. The chapter offers recommendations for people management practice aimed at reducing or mitigating occupational factors that exacerbate illness and maximizing those facilitating recovery in the perinatal period and beyond, thus advancing work-life inclusion.

Chronic illnesses often go unnoticed mainly due to their invisibility and lack of understanding both at home and in the workplace. In this chapter, I use an autoethnographic approach to engage with my “emotionally charged” lived experiences of living and working with a stigmatized chronic illness – irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) – in a highly patriarchal Pashtun society where women are expected to perform various social roles despite of illness and are often silenced to male domination. IBS is a functional gastrointestinal disorder characterized by abdominal pain, abnormal bowel function, and bloating, in the absence of any structural abnormalities, and has a significant impact on one’s life. As I navigate through my experiences of suffering from a chronic illness and the emotional labor involved therein, I shed light on the challenges I face as a woman in managing work and life and as I silence my pain and emotions to fit into the roles of a “professional” academic, a “good” wife, a “good” daughter, a “good” sister-in-law, a “good” daughter-in-law, and so forth. I have used both the lens of stigma to reflect my sufferings and normalization to demonstrate my resilience and (re)adjustment to the new life. In doing so, pain and emotions do leak out during intense situations but silencing chronic illness is mostly strategic as it protects us from being excluded, marginalized, and stigmatzed both at work and home.

Presents extracts from the stories of mid‐career women who have unseen chronic illness, exemplifying numerous gender and work‐related issues. Uses Heideggerian phenomenology to understand the experience of being a woman with an unseen illness, who also works full time. Eight women were interviewed. These women were seen to reside “in‐between” wellness and sickness, junior and senior organisational roles, and home and work responsibilities. They shared some of the difficulties they have faced. First, were problems influenced by the medical community as associated with getting a diagnosis. Given their full‐time career responsibilities, this was interpreted as being problematic. There were also related problems reported about colleagues assuming, because of their healthful appearance, that nothing was the matter and acting accordingly. The “woman’s role”, as experienced by sick women who also worked full time, added to their struggle to continue careers, care for others and attempt to attend to their own health. Illness, especially invisible illness, is rarely examined through the combined lens of workplace and gender.

The purpose of the present study was to advance a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms by which WISEs can influence the stigma associated with mental illness. Many people with serious mental illnesses want to work, but despite much attention to work entry strategies, unemployment rates remain exceptionally high among this population. Stigma has been identified as a particularly pernicious barrier to the full community participation of people with mental illnesses. If work integration social enterprises (WISE) are to positively impact the full community participation of people with mental illnesses, then addressing stigma will be integral to their operation.

A comparative case study approach was used to address the following research questions: “How is the stigma of mental illness experienced in the everyday operations of WISE?” and “What influence do WISEs have on the stigma of mental illness within the workplace and beyond?” Five established WISEs that pay workers at minimum wage or better were selected for inclusion. The maximum variation sample included WISEs that varied in terms of geographical location, form of commerce, business size, revenues and degree of connection with mental health systems and local communities. Data analysis was conducted in four stages using qualitative methods.

The study findings suggest processes by which WISEs can positively impact the stigma of mental illness. Three social processes are associated with the potential of WISE to contribute to stigma reduction: perception of legitimacy, perception of value and perception of competence. Each of these social processes is fueled by underlying tensions in practice that arise in the context of negotiating the dual goals of the business.

This study advances theoretical understanding of the ways in which stigma may be perpetuated or reduced in WISE by revealing the social processes and practice tensions that may be associated with operation choices made by WISEs and their partners. Further research would be required to determine if the processes described actually lead to reduced stigma. Although efforts were made to select WISEs that demonstrate a variety of features, it is likely that some important features were absent. Additional research could further explore the findings identified here with WISEs from other sectors, including youth and workers with transient or less severe forms of illness. This work should be replicated internationally to explore how contextual factors may influence individual and public perceptions.

The findings provide guidance for WISE developers in the mental health sector concerning strategies that may help mitigate the development of stigmatizing features within a social enterprise and by extension improve the work experience and workforce integration of employees. The identification of these processes and tensions can be used to advance the development of consensus principles and standards in the WISE field and contribute to ongoing evaluation and research.

WISEs have the potential to reduce stigma, an important goal to support their efforts to improve employment and integration outcomes for people with mental illnesses. Through their business structures and operations they may be able to impact stigma by positively influencing perceptions of legitimacy, value and competence – all issues that have been associated with public assumptions about mental illness that sustain stigma.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is one of the first to specifically focus on stigma in the WISE sector, particularly as it relates to the work integration of persons with mental illnesses. The findings provide a range of theoretical and practical implications for future development in the field and highlight factors that merit consideration more broadly in the sector.

Mental disorders are common and associated with substantial levels of work disability. Relative to persons with most types of physical impairments, persons with mental disorders have lower employment rates and lower mean wages, and experience greater discrimination in the workplace (Baldwin, 1999, 2000; Baldwin & Johnson, 1995, 2000). Persons with mental disorders have lower socioeconomic status, on average, and greater risk of living in poverty, than persons with physical disorders (Dohrenwend et al., 1992). By 1999, mental disorders had supplanted back cases as the health condition most frequently cited in employment discrimination charges filed under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (Moss et al., 1999).

Illness narratives provide a useful lens for analysing neoliberal citizenship at a micro level, from the point of view of patients, family caregivers and healthcare professionals. Indeed, they reveal how people think about and act on their health and disease; they also tell us something about the social context in which illness is experienced, thereby illuminating dominant discourses.

According to Mol (2008), health and illness can be thought about and acted on according to two logics: the logic of choice and the logic of care. The logic of choice entails the neoliberal principle that people should be allowed to make their own autonomous choices. The logic of care implies an interpersonal process of co-responsibility over one’s health and illness.

Drawing on Mol’s work, the chapter presents a thematic content analysis of 20 illness narratives of patients with multiple sclerosis and their caregivers, questioning whether these two logics conflict with each other or whether they are intertwined.

To examine some of the complex relationships that exist between sports work and mental health and illness.

This chapter draws upon prevalence data, athlete testimonies, and theoretical works to examine: (1) the prevalence of depression and suicide in professional sport and the wider society; (2) athlete experiences of depression and suicidal ideation, particularly among men; and (3) some of the key sociological ideas which might help to explain experiences of mental health and illness in professional sports work.

Although there are plentiful data on the societal prevalence of depression and suicide, increasing interest in the mental health of professional athletes (and other types of sports workers) has occurred largely in response to individual or clusters of often publicly known, sometimes high profile, cases rather than in response to systematic empirical grounded data. Athlete experiences of mental illness are shown to be related in complex ways to various constraints associated with their public and private lives, to the constraints of their interdependency networks, and to experiences of shame which can have a series of deleterious acute and chronic health costs.

Since much of what is currently known about the links between sports work and mental health and illness is derived from largely psychological studies and media-led or autobiographical accounts, more sociological research is needed to better understand the costs of mental health of working in often very public and highly pressurized, medicalized, scientized, and performance-focused performance sport settings.

The authors sought initial validity evidence for a measure of anticipated discrimination in the workplace using three samples of working adults with various chronic illnesses. The purpose of this paper is to propose a single factor structure, correlations with stigma dimensions, discriminant validity from similar scales, and incremental validity in predicting work-related outcomes.

Adults working at least 20 hours per week with various chronic illnesses (Sample 1 n=332, Sample 2 n=193, Sample 3 n=230) voluntarily completed an online survey. Structural equation modeling and hierarchical multiple regression were used to analyze the data.

Results supported the proposed single-factor structure, along with proposed correlations with strain, and job attitudes (job satisfaction, affective commitment, and both procedural justice). Discriminant validity was observed between anticipated discrimination and procedural justice perceptions and perceived impact on performance. The scale demonstrated incremental validity in predicting strain beyond the relevant controls in all three samples, although it only demonstrated incremental validity in predicting job satisfaction in Samples 1 and 3 and affective commitment in Sample 1.

Study limitations include the use of single-source, cross-sectional data, omission of a non-stigmatized sample, and a deductive approach to item generation. Future research should attempt to validate the scale on other stigmatized worker populations.

Organizations may use this scale to monitor employees’ perceptions of anticipated discrimination and researchers may use it as a measure of a workplace stressor.

The vast majority of existing stigma and discrimination scales do not specifically address the workplace context. This study contributes to the literature by providing psychometric information for a workplace anticipated discrimination scale using samples from an under-represented worker population.

This study examines the influence of perceived work‐related stress levels and levels of job satisfaction on work‐related injury/illnesses. Further, the influence of demographic data on these variables is also considered. The data were collected in a Federal Government study on Workplace Industrial Activities across Australia (AWIRS 95). It appears, from the data, that there is a significant relationship between low levels of job satisfaction and the reporting of work‐related injury/illnesses in the previous 12 months. This is also true for people who reported high levels of job stress. The data show that women seem to be more satisfied than their male colleagues and have fewer injuries and/or illnesses. One reason for the low level of injury/illness may be due to the occupations that men and women occupy. It seems that people who work in such occupations as labourers, plant and machine operators and tradespersons and apprentices are the most likely to have work‐related accidents and/or illnesses than other occupations and many of the people in the high injury incident occupations appear to be males. The study draws tentative conclusions on the influence of demographic data on levels of job satisfaction and job stress and the relationships with work‐related injury and/or illnesses.