The value of work in the 1980s

Abstract

Mental health professionals seem to have a curiously ambivalent attitude towards work. On the one hand, it is generally accepted that the experience of unemployment is often associated with severe social and psychological distress. On the other, we seem reluctant to strive to provide work for those patients who have the greatest social and psychiatric disabilities and for whom work, in all its forms, may have the greatest benefit. I don't wish to speculate on the psychological roots of this ambivalence, although I suspect that it stems, at least in part, from the way in which we all feel about our own jobs. However, there are other reasons why the concept of work has always sat uneasily within the context of psychiatric services.