Work is good for health: a thread to post and discuss the evidence for this statement

I very much doubt anybody would get funding these days to investigate the benefits of not working :p

Work undoubtedly has many benefits for many people, such as financial security, meaning, identity, stimulation and companionship, to name but a few. And yes, many people will draw those positives primarily from work. But many others will find them elsewhere, too.

There are also plenty of people whose work doesn't provide them with enough of those positive benefits - as shown by the almost epidemic levels of workplace stress and burn out. If you're looking for studies showing negative effects of work, that's where I would start looking.

The obsession with work is really much more about societal expectations of economically contributing units than it is about individual wellbeing.
 
Ravn said:
almost epidemic levels of workplace stress and burn out. If you're looking for studies showing negative effects of work, that's where I would start looking.
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Or even more basic issues of health and safety.

The illegal gold miners in Indonesia dealing with mercury and flash flooding when the dams created by sedimentation upstream blow-out, the loggers of swamp forest in Guyana based out of remote camps facing quick deaths from chainsaw cuts or being squashed by falling trees or slower deaths from typhoid or malaria, cooks with respiratory disease from working in kitchens with unflued wood cooking stoves. ....

Work is good for health... it's a pretty simplistic message.
 
I think the idea of 'work is good for health' came from:
1. Aims by government benefits agencies to cut welfare spending by finding justifications for sending people back to work, particularly those with mental health problems.

2. A search for 'research' to make this seem like a justified policy and finding those in work were happier/healthier than those not in work, and inverting the reasons from 'good mental and physical health enables people to work' to 'work is good for people's physical and mental health'.

3. The experience of people making the policy that they found their own work enjoyable and fulfilling, so assuming this must be true for everyone else. That includes seeing people who have unpleasant, boring or dangerous work as being from a different species to themselves, and well suited to such work. A sort of patronising 'Mrs Jones is not very bright, but she gets great fulfilment from getting up at 4am to scrub the floors I walk on'.
 
Not to say it doesn't exist but I am having difficulty finding anything much about work being good for health in Canada.

I found one example of joining a choir at work being good and an article on why an employees financial well-being matters.

I expect the thinking exists. there are many ways to acquire this sort of message through more subtle means/media.

But the clear message of 'Arbeit macht frei', I couldn't find.

This fact could be useful perhaps if it seems that the UK is all on it's own in presenting the idea in the way they do.

ETA: The way I searched was to input the wording from the links provided by Simbindi with Canada as location.
 
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Snowdrop said:
This fact could be useful perhaps if it seems that the UK is all on it's own in presenting the idea in the way they do.
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I found the web page that shows the history of the Department of Work and Pensions' development of this idea, with all the relevant links to their commissioned research and 'evidence':

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/health-work-and-wellbeing-evidence-and-research

It is definitely about reducing government expediture on working age sickness benefits. The UK may be alone in promoting this concept because so few people in the UK have private disablity and sickness insurance, and when they do it is often time-limited (e.g. for 1-5 years maximum payout rather than giving them a permanent disability pension).

It is relevant to us (as PWME) because this underlying agenda is one of the reasons for the implementation of the original IAPT programme and the more recent IAPT for Long Term Conditions and Medically Unexplained Symptoms. The fact that the latter includes CFS/ME is strong evidence that the DWP includes our condition as a 'common health condition' (because the symptoms we have include 'chronic fatigue' and 'musculoskeletal pain', as well it being believed that anxiety and depression are also common in CFS).

So I think it will be essential for the revised NICE guidelines to stipulate the nature of 'post exertional maiaise', explain clearly that we have a 'broken energy production system' and that even the most limited exertion can be dangerous to a person with ME (or 'CFS/ME'). Otherwise, it will be assumed by any health care professional that some work (even if a only small amount) will be good for the CFS/ME patient/benefit claimant they are assessing. In other words, it will not be accepted that being expected to engage in 'work-related activity', or possibly even in 'work' as paid employment, could pose a 'serious risk to the claimant's health'. It's also another reason why we desperately need CBT as well as GET removed as treatments or management in the NICE guidance and any other NHS information or training material.

Edit: It is also important that the revised NICE guidelines point out that ME can cause severe cognitive difficulties and cognitive exertion alone can induce severe PEM, as otherwise it will be assumed that PWME can do non-physical 'desk-based' work and work-related activities.
 
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Simbindi said:
It is definitely about reducing government expediture on working age sickness benefits. The UK may be alone in promoting this concept because so few people in the UK have private disablity and sickness insurance, and when they do it is often time-limited
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It's pretty big in the US as well. Many states have work requirements to have access to disability. It's exactly what it means: if you want disability you have to try looking for work and if you can find employment then you don't need disability and if you can't then maybe but you'll be rejected at first and will likely need a lawyer to get it sorted out. The implied message is that if you can't work because you are sick then you can go straight to hell, being spit on the whole way, since you are clearly sub-human. Unless you are of retirement age, then it's a whole other mess. It varies a lot between states, though.

Though I hear this more often with the current election cycle in Canada, with every promise from some of the parties being all about workers this and work that, completely erasing anyone who isn't in paid employment as a person worth even looking at.

It'll be weird once automation starts replacing jobs in large numbers and fit-for-work people can't get unemployment because they are excluded from policies created strictly and solely for rugged self-interest. But the language of disabled people as second class citizens isn't veiled anymore, it's plain and loud.
 
Simbindi said:
It is relevant to us (as PWME) because this underlying agenda is one of the reasons for the implementation of the original IAPT programme and the more recent IAPT for Long Term Conditions and Medically Unexplained Symptoms.
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Most definitely did not want to imply that there was no relevance to discussing the issue here.
 
Snowdrop said:
No worries. I thought it probably was generic but it's sometimes hard to tell so wanted to clarify that.
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I'm autistic - pretty much everything I write is a generic response to what I read, and usually my posts are just factual! I tend to quote bits of members posts as an introduction to my own reply if I think their words are well expressed and relevant to what I want to say myself.
 
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