Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Britain

Based on recent data gathered from employees and managers, Work and the Mental Health Crisis in Britain challenges the cultural maxim that work benefits people with mental health difficulties, and illustrates how particular cultures and perceptions can contribute to a crisis of mental well-being at work.

• Based on totally new data gathered from employees and managers in the UK
• Presents a challenge to much of the conventional wisdom surrounding work and mental health
• Questions the fundamental and largely accepted cultural maxim that work is unquestionably good for people with mental health difficulties
• Illustrates how particular cultures of work or perceptions of the experience of work contribute to a crisis of mental well-being at work
• Fills a need for an up-to-date, detailed work that explores the ways that mental health and work experiences are constructed, negotiated, constrained and at times, marginalised
• Written in a style that is detailed and informative for academics and professionals who work in the mental health sphere, but also accessible to interested lay readers

Carl Walker is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Sciences, University of Brighton. His research and teaching interests include social inequality and mental distress, cultural representations of mental health, and critical community approaches to psychology. He is course leader for the MA in Community Psychology and is currently engaged in work around employment, personal debt and mental distress. His previous publications include Depression and Globalisation (2007). Ben Fincham is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Sussex. He has been involved with developing projects on 'mobilities' and qualitative approaches to studying work in unstable employment environments, and his current research focuses on the complex relationship between work and mental health. He is co-author of Mobile Methodologies (2010).