Rethink Work

Changing how we think about work

#Mental Health

There are currently 18 articles in this category    RSS

  • faviconWorkplace surveillance may hurt us more than it helps — Workplace surveillance should be subject to regulatory oversight and ideally collective bargaining, since individuals will be better placed to negotiate the details en masse [2021]
    In: Predatory capitalism    
    Topics: Mental Health, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconThis Job Is (Literally) Killing Me: A Moderated-Mediated Model Linking Work Characteristics to Mortality — When job demands are greater than the control afforded by the job or the individual’s ability to deal with those demands, there is a deterioration of the individual’s mental health and, accordingly, an increased likelihood of death (PDF) [2020]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconHow the reduction of working hours could influence health outcomes: a systematic review of published studies — findings suggest that the reduction of working hours with retained salary could be an effective workplace intervention for the improvement of employees’ well-being, especially regarding stress and sleep [2022]
    In: Working hours    
    Topics: 4 Day Week, Mental Health, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: BMJ    

  • faviconThe Spy Who Fired Me — In industry after industry, this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional, and physical limits [2015]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Mental Health, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: Harper's Magazine    

  • faviconA meta-analysis on the crossover of workplace traumatic stress symptoms between partners — Workers’ PTSD/distress from violence, harassment and abuse on the job is as harmful for their intimate partners as the traumatic stressors are for workers encountering them firsthand, shows research [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Research   
    Comments   
    Source: Scientific Journals    

  • faviconWhat if work is making us sick? While employment has become less physically dangerous, it seems to have become more psychologically harmful, as high demands and low control at work — known in the academic literature as “job strain” — is bad for mental and physical health [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Technofeudalism   
    Comments   
    Source: Financial Times    

  • faviconHappiness Consultants Won’t Stop a Depression — Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness, is a quack science; it condemns all social critics, iconoclasts, dissidents and individualists for failing to seek fulfillment in the collective chant of the corporate herd. In the land of happy thoughts, we are to blame if things go wrong [2009]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Truthdig    

  • faviconWhy Americans Care About Work So Much – Workism is rooted in the belief that employment can provide everything we have historically expected from organized religion [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: The Atlantic    

  • faviconOur Only Imperative is to Achieve – Philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues in ‘Burnout Society’ that a cult of individual achievement has led to mass burnout and depression across society. Resisting burnout is simple, but easier said than done: we must slow down, and rediscover how to think [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: How to be Human, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Philosophy Break    

  • faviconWe think of it as an individual problem, but burnout is the result of conditions in workplaces, workplace culture. And it’s a result of society and the view that we have of how work plays a role in being a good citizen, being a good person and so on [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: NPR    

  • faviconBurnout is a structural issue, built into the dysfunctions of the industry. Burnout is made out of individualism, and meritocracy, and doing too much with too little. It is built on the idea that if we skip a meal and work more hours, we might finally get ahead [2015]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Independent Blogs    

  • faviconWork, Work, Work — So a Few Can Be Rich: Inside every workplace, management control mechanisms have been put in place, the result of which has been stress, injuries, depression, and a profound sense of alienation, the consequence of living under the control of others [2022]
    In: Democracy & Power,  Predatory capitalism    
    Topics: Mental Health, Workplace Dictatorship   
    Comments   
    Source: CounterPunch    

  • faviconEveryone working less – with no reduction in pay – could be a solution to everything from Britain’s chronic productivity problems and the mental health pandemic to the broken care sector. It’s better for the planet, too: the overworked drive more, eat more processed food & buy more disposable items [2023]
    In: Working hours    
    Topics: 4 Day Week, Environment, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Country: UK   
    Source: The Guardian    

  • faviconClassical Music’s Burnout Addiction: The unhealthy practices in music education that prime young musicians for failure from the beginning – particularly the belief that burnout-inducing schedules offer an accurate representation of the professional world, to see if they’ll crack under the pressure [2023]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: Various    

  • faviconA lot of advice for how an individual can deal with it burnout simply won’t work because they leave it to the individual worker to heal their own burnout. But the individual didn’t cause their own burnout; their culture and workplace did. Lasting solutions have to happen on the collective level [2022]
    In: Predatory capitalism    
    Topics: Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: The Next Big Idea Club    

  • faviconBurnout is not a thing inside us that has gone wrong. It’s the relationship between our ideals for work and the reality of our jobs. To counter it, we need to make work less central to how we understand our lives and spend more time with our families, communities and enjoy more leisure time [2022]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Mental Health, Workism   
    Comments   
    Source: Welcome to the Jungle    

  • favicon“We’ve created a society where we fear boredom and we’re afraid of doing nothing,” says psychology lecturer Dr Sandi Mann. But in trying to avoid boredom, we miss out on its benefits. When we’re bored, we daydream, and that has been linked to creativity [2024]
    In: Good life    
    Topics: Leisure, Mental Health   
    Comments   
    Source: BBC    

  • faviconThe Protestant work ethic is the notion that your worth is a function of your hard work: what you produce. This is the mental illness of our time. The idea of hard work put forth in American society is a burden that crushes the broken and disenfranchised and suffocates the souls of those who grit their teeth and bear it [2018]
    In: Democracy & Power    
    Topics: Mental Health, Protestant Work Ethic   
    Comments   
    Country: US   
    Source: Life After Dogma