1,720,962 research outputs found
Identities, mental health and the workplace: a critical exploration
Full text linkThe incidence of mental illness is both a widespread and growing; and yet studies show that employers are reluctant to hire people with mental health conditions (MHCs). Despite often having an excellent set of qualifications and skills, backed up with a sound employment record, the stigma surrounding mental illness means that people with MHCs struggle to gain and maintain employment. This study explores the experiences of people with MHCs in work. The research focuses on how these individuals manage their condition while maintaining a legitimate identity at work in the context of widespread stigma over mental illness.
Taking a critical poststructuralist approach to identity, and drawing on semi-structured interviews with people with MHCs, the research highlights a complex set of factors facilitating the construction of a pejorative mental illness subject position that prevails in contemporary society and in the workplace. The study also illustrates how individuals act upon this subject position and the effects this has on their working lives. Finally, the study considers the agential practices of self-management that are illustrative of the process of resistance and the negotiation of a legitimised identity. The study considers the effectiveness of these struggles over seeing, being and doing for the long term prospects of mental health at work.
The study offers contributions to knowledge in three areas: to critical identities literature by including the experiences of mental health in the study of marginalised identities at work; to the literature on invisible and stigmatised identities, by providing a better understanding on the processes of identification; and to theorising on resistance and resistant identities as practices of self-care (Foucault, 1986). In doing so, the research not only critically analyses the concerns of a marginalised group at work but also offers broader implications to understanding mental health of all workers, and for society at large
Working against the backdrop of extreme marginalisation : stigma and the social relational model for the setting of mental health conditions
Full text linkThis paper investigates how employees with mental health conditions (MHCs) experience and respond to working in the contemporary UK workplace. Employing the Social Relational Model (SRM) of disability, the paper positions stigma as an organising structural force that actively produces Social and Relational disabling barriers—impairment effects, barriers to doing, and barriers to being—that shape the working lives of employees with MHCs. Qualitative data from 42 interviewees working for varied employers—including small, medium and large enterprises, public and private sector— reveals how workplace processes and practices assume norms of the ‘ideal worker’, a worker characterised by uninterrupted productivity and emotional stability. We explore how these norms contribute to the stigmatisation of workers managing MHCs and how consequently these workers avoid workplace stigmatisation. By explicitly linking understandings of structural stigma to the SRM, we advance understanding of how stigma operates in often indirect and subtle ways to disable employees with MHCs. Conclusions with implications for HRM include the need to confront normative ideals and institutional practices that sustain stigma by advocating for practices that dismantle stigma, challenge ableist constructs, support diverse mental health experiences and, focus on creating ideal workplaces, rather than continuing to valorise the ideal worker
Invisible minds : The dominant wellbeing discourse, mental health, bio-power and chameleon resistance
No full textThe dominant wellbeing discourse (DWD) in neoliberal economies can be understood as a form of bio-power that presupposes healthy individuals. It seeks to produce subjects who take responsibility for their wellbeing and, in this way, render themselves productive. Drawing on interviews with individuals who volunteered a diagnosed mental health condition (MHC), we explore how they resisted the negative associations with MHCs through making their conditions invisible. Hence they sought to blend in and make themselves visible as ‘normal’, well, healthy, responsible, productive subjects. Although we call this chameleon resistance it is bound up with consent and compliance as it reproduces the DWD and negative associations with MHCs
Learning to manage a mental health condition: Caring for the self, and ‘normalizing’ identity at work
Full text linkThis article examines the internal and external pressures to ‘normalize’ identity in relation to individuals experiencing mental health conditions (MHCs) at work. The data takes the form of three vignettes extracted from a larger empirical study of 60 interviews. These explore the tensions surrounding identity for individuals experiencing MHCs as well as their interventions to suppress exhibiting the condition. The analysis captures a number of competing meanings surrounding identity in relation to learning to care for the self and managing MHCs. Our contribution is to explore the relationships between learning to care for the self and the performativity of ‘normalizing’ identity in managing MHCs at work. It also provides a potential means of integrating Foucault’s ethics of caring for the self with the literature on identity in ways that can be illuminating for those who manage their MHCs and the demands of work through processes of ‘normalization’. Our analysis
offers theoretical insights regarding how identity work may be selfdefeating in exacerbating MHCs and therefore is of some practical benefit for managers, health professionals and those experiencing MHCs sincethey often leave individuals with little choice but to intensify their
attempts to ‘normalize’ their identities
The ‘sellable semblance’ : Employability in the context of mental-illness
Full text linkEmbedded within the concept of employability is the constant demand to become more ‘employable’ and to live up to an ideal ‘sellable self’, with no ‘faults’, ‘weaknesses’ or ‘limitations’. In order to maintain employability and stay in employment, individuals may be constrained to conceal information that does not correspond to this sellable self. Examining the costs of living up to the ‘semblance’ of the sellable self is particularly important in relation to mental health; this is even more so in light of the paucity of critical studies in this context. This paper examines issues of mental health and employability as they are reflected upon through the experiences of people with mental health conditions. Looking at the employment experiences of these individuals offers the potential to illuminate the struggles of all, or most of us, in our endeavours to secure employment and retain employability
Discourse and Identity : Conceptualising the Self for Individuals with Mental Health Conditions
No full textIdentity, mental health and work : how employees with mental health conditions recount stigma and the pejorative discourse of mental illness
Full text linkThis article asks how identity is constructed for individuals with mental health conditions (MHCs) in the workplace. It takes especial regard to how MHCs are discursively situated, constructed and reconstructed in the workplace. Employees with MHCs face a difficult situation: not only do they need to deal with the stigma and discrimination commonly associated with MHCs, but they must also manage their health condition whilst adhering to organizational demands to demonstrate performance and commitment to work. Discourse analysis derived from 32 interviews with individuals with MHCs delineates how these individuals feel both stigmatized and empowered by their MHCs. The findings address three discursive strands: (i) a pejorative construction of mental illness in employment and society; (ii) contesting mental illness at work by embracing mental health management skills; and (iii) recounting mental illness through public disclosure and change. This article enhances understanding of how the construction of positive identity in the face of negative attributions associated with MHCs contributes to literature on identity, organizations and stigma as well as raising implications for policy and practice
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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