Bureaucratic Entrepreneurism and the Growing Mental Health Crisis at Work

Safety Differently ^ | Aug 2017 | Sidney Dekker

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Many places around the globe have seen significant changes in how work is organized. This has not been without social or psychological consequences. The organized, temporary migration of labor to where resources are to be mined, for example, or stadiums to be built, has led to the segregation of mostly male workforces. These groups are taken away from any meaningful social network, from the stabilizing and relativizing influences of family and friends, from their known environments. Some mining companies even refuse to employ local people: instead, they only employ people who live within a commuting distance from a large airport hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away. They proudly announce that their workforce is 100% FIFO (Fly-in, Fly-out).

No longer are there communities, or actual towns that support a connected, dignified human existence. Instead, workers end up in camps where they live a regimented, lonely, institutionalized existence of steely emptiness. In some resource-rich countries, FIFO labor has been a social experiment on a massive scale that was bound to have consequences. Last year, worker suicides in the mining industry in one such country claimed as many people as did fatal workplace accidents (Tozer & Hargraeves, 2016).

[Seruzawa]

Yes yes. More reasons to get more people on psych meds so they can murder their families and coworkers.

Good for the multibillion dollar mental health industry though. Selling the cause of insanity as the cure for it is a real PR coup.

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Actually the problem with the mental health system is precisely bureaucracy. (Among other things.)