Well-Being and Creative Careers
What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick
Abstract
There is a mental health crisis among media professionals around the world - in journalism, advertising/marketing/PR, film and television, digital games, music (recording and performance), and online content creation. The crisis consists of mental issues – with extraordinarily high instances of anxiety, trauma, burnout, and depression; physical ailments - prevalent substance abuse, unhealthy living, sleep problems, and exhaustion; and spiritual problems – including people becoming disenchanted with the promise of a creative career.
At the same time, most professionals claim to love doing what they do, suggesting that what makes people happy also makes them sick.
This book documents what is particular about well-being in creative careers in the media, offers an analysis of systemic issues throughout the media industries that explain why so many practitioners get sick on the job and shows what can be done. What ends up causing work-related stress disorders is a combination of a lack of reciprocity between what people bring to the job and what the industry offers in return, organizational injustice as people perceive policies and decisions at work to be discriminatory and unfair, and persistent high workloads.
In conclusion, Deuze suggests that the labor-of-love work ethic that is so typical of the way people 'make it work' can be a problem as much as it provides a way forward.
