What Makes Media Work Special is Also What Can Make People Sick
/In recent years, across various media professions around the world, a series of reports, industry-wide surveys and studies commissioned by unions and other organized networks documented what some call a mental health crisis among media practitioners. Prominent examples include a series of ‘Mentally Healthy’ reports by Never Not Creative, UnLtd, and Everymind in Australia (since 2018 surveying thousands of workers across various media industries), a landmark 2022 ‘Taking Care’ report on the wellbeing of Canadian media workers, regular ‘Looking Glass’ survey reports on the UK film and tv sector by the Film and TV Charity, the Australian Actors’ Wellbeing Study (AWS), and media professionals from around the world participating in cross-national surveys such as by the World Federation of Advertisers (in the context of its Global Diversity Equity and Inclusion Census starting in 2021), the annual Developer Satisfaction Survey by the International Game Developers Association (conducted in some form since 2004), and the International Center for Journalists (as part of its monitoring of the consequences of the pandemic). Reports on content creators, streamers, influencers and others in social media entertainment similarly suggest such practitioners often struggle with mental health issues related to the work.
The majority of workers in the media – in digital games, advertising, marketing communications and public relations, film and television, music, social media, and journalism – report experiencing mental health problems, struggling with feelings of fatigue, isolation and depression related to the job, and experiencing irregular and inadequate sleep. Media professionals subsequently tend to engage in a variety of unhealthy lifestyle practices such as lack of regular physical activity, poor nutrition and overeating, and smoking and alcohol abuse. Despite all of this, most of these industry studies and reports note that professionals still claim to be satisfied on the job. As one recent research headline notes: “Journalists Sense Turmoil in Their Industry Amid Continued Passion for Their Work” (from a 2022 survey among nearly 12,000 U.S.-based working journalists by the Pew Research Center).
While the numbers differ somewhat in different industries, in different parts of the world, and the way all of this impacts the working lives of individuals in specific contexts, a global picture emerges of an industry where its professionals are clearly suffering yet also seemingly happy at work. It is exactly this tension between vision and reality that goes to the heart of any debate and assessment of mental health and wellbeing in media work.
When considered in terms of work-related psycho-social risk factors, working in the media has remarkably consistent key elements that can be considered to be potentially hazardous to people’s physical and mental health, across the broad spectrum of professional media production practices:
professionals generally work in informal circumstances, quite often unregulated and without clear policies, protocols and standards (for example regarding bodily and social safety);
an ever-transforming technological context of the work expects workers to constantly learn and adapt to new standards, skills, and production processes;
the work tends to be (physically, cognitively, emotionally) involving and demanding, as expressed in long working hours, having to manage intense emotions (of colleagues, clients, as well as consumers), and needing to be ‘always on’ to keep going and make it work;
jobs are few and far between, often without formal benefits such as sick pay, medical or legal protections, and scheduled time off, and tend to be governed by conditions of ‘atypical’ or non-standard employment;
the job market tends to be quite competitive, high strung and conflictful, involving a lot of unpaid and speculative labor; and
the culture at work can be characterized by constant looming deadlines, unusually intense schedules and pressured productivity, all of which are further illustrated by numerous industry-wide reports of ‘toxic’ work cultures (often on the level of specific teams or certain departments) where favoritism, bullying and work overload are prevalent. Some high-profile examples include Weta Digital in New Zealand, the Ellen DeGeneres TV show in the U.S., Canadian newspaper The Toronto Star, game company Activision Blizzard facing numerous lawsuits, and Dutch popular tv show DWDD facing formal workplace reviews or lawsuits, and dealing with worker suicides.
It is important to note that all more or less work-related hazardous issues related to the physical and mental health of media professionals tend to be disproportionally experienced by women, minorities, workers with disabilities, and those working in non-standard employment settings. Moving forward to addressing these issues, it is therefore essential to take an intersectional approach – considering how aspects such as gender, ethnicity, class, age, ability, and family status intersect when experiencing, coping with and addressing occupational hazards and work-related stress disorders.
Considering the available evidence regarding the mental health and wellbeing of media professionals, it seems we are faced with a paradox: what makes media work special is also what can make people sick. The very elements that are most likely to contribute to mental illness because of circumstances at work – a highly pressured, informally organized environment where people tend to be passionate about the work – also add to the attractiveness of such jobs throughout the various media industries. Key factors that explain the occurrence and persistence of work-related stress disorders across various industrial sectors tend to be paramount for the media industries: lack of reciprocity (between people’s passionate engagement and the often-indifferent nature of the industry), low procedural justice (typified by less than clear policies and inadequate management), and unusually high job demands (in media governed by the permanent deadline of the digital). Work in the media, in other words, for many constitutes a distinct occupational hazard.
It has to be noted that there is an emerging awareness on all of this across the media industry. Some companies provide employees free access to mental health applications such as Moment, Moodkit and Headspace, offer (some) counseling sessions, appoint confidential advisers, and organize events around employee wellbeing. Notably, freelancers tend to be excluded from such initiatives, and at the moment these are still exceptions to the rule of the industry still underestimating, downplaying or willfully ignoring that media work comes at a cost.
What remains is the question of what we (as media scholars, educators, students, current and future media professionals) can do? Many of the referenced industry reports in this post make excellent recommendations for companies to introduce formal protocols for addressing problematic work cultures and handling health issues, raising awareness of health and wellbeing at work, and calling for further professionalization when it comes to issues related to mental health and wellbeing.
Although these issues play out across the various industries, only the field of journalism has a relatively well-developed field of scholarship and practice around mental health, trauma and wellbeing, offering rich resources. Of particular relevance here I would like to mention the ‘Recommendations for supporting journalists’ well-being’ drawn up by a British working group on journalists’ wellbeing in the Spring of 2022, featuring representatives of the BBC, British National Union of Journalists, Centre for Media Monitoring, European Federation of Journalists, Headlines Network, Reach, Rory Peck Trust, Society of Freelance Journalists and UNESCO, as well as academics (disclaimer: I had the privilege of participating with this working group). These recommendations, applicable to any kind of media organization, as documented by Maja Šimunjak of Middlesex University London, include:
acknowledge the well-being issue and contribute to the culture change;
create and deliver fair and transparent support systems within media organizations;
ensure well-being practices and systems are accessible and sustainable; and
build and join coalitions to support evidence-informed solutions.
Another important initiative I would like to mention is the Journalism Education and Trauma Research Group (JETREG), originally formed by about sixty journalism educators around the world, meeting regularly online and organizing symposia, workshops, and seminars, and contributing to publications.
Beyond these examples I would like to conclude this contribution with a benchmark scholarly intervention in the field: the promotion and development of mental health literacy specific to media work, and the necessity to highlight and pursue research and teaching in media (and related fields) that is grounded in the principles of creative justice.
First, one could argue that what media work seems to be missing is a certain degree of mental health literacy, broadly defined as knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders which aid their recognition, management or prevention. Considered in more detail by Australian psychologist Tony Jorm (who originally coined the concept in the mid-1990s), mental health literacy consists of:
a) knowledge of how to prevent mental disorders,
b) recognition of when a disorder is developing,
c) knowledge of help-seeking options and treatments (insofar as such options are available),
d) knowledge of effective self-help strategies, and
e) first aid skills to support others affected by mental health problems.
Throughout the literature and industry reports it seems that media organizations tend to take little or no responsibility for the mental health of their employees – let alone for the growing army of freelancers and otherwise atypically employed professionals that make up the bulk of the workforce. Furthermore, the culture of the business – with its roots in a ‘tough-nosed’ style of management, relentless focus on deadlines, an overall lack of diversity, equity and inclusivity, coupled with a naturalization of stressful working conditions (“this is just the way things work around here”) – is not particularly conducive to the development and implementation of mental health literacy. One could add to this kind of literacy particular to media work the development of a nuanced notion of mental health and wellbeing as outlined earlier, including the critical awareness that the very elements that can contribute to mental illness also explain the attractiveness of the work.
Second, Mark Banks (of the University of Glasgow) advocates how we should pursue creative justice in all our work – and promotes corresponding practices throughout the media industries. When making sense of, managing, or doing media work, creative justice means respecting all the internal benefits, capacities and pleasures media work provides, without discounting the external structures and pressures (such as exploitation, alienation, low pay, and stress) that can make media work deeply unfair and unjust. This additionally includes advancing social arrangements that allow for the maximum range of people to enter and participate in the work, in which they will be fairly treated and justly paid and rewarded for their efforts. It is this inclusive, inevitably ambivalent perspective on mental health and wellbeing in media work that is necessary in order to move forward effectively.
Of course, simply introducing mental health literacy and creative justice does not solve any problems – some would argue the root cause is (the culture of contemporary) capitalism, where success seems to be premised on one’s ability to accept fragmentation and permanent change, which in turn prohibits the kind of anticipation and hope that one needs in order to rebel against intolerable working conditions. However, I would argue that adequate literacy about mental health, and pursuing work benchmarked with the principles of creative justice, can empower media scholars, students and (prospective) professionals alike to both envision and enact different futures.
Biography
Mark Deuze is a professor of Journalism and Media Culture at the University of Amsterdam (before that at Indiana University). He is author of 11 books, including McQuail's Media and Mass Communicatin Theory (Sage, 2020), Leven in Media(Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Media Life (Polity Press, 2012) and Media Work (Polity Press, 2007).
