The Work Cure: Critical essays on work and wellness

This provocative collection of essays presents a powerful critique of contemporary discourse that portrays work - paid employment - as a moral imperative, essential for our health and well-being.

The contributors describe the mental health impact of modern-day workplaces, with their precarity and constant managerial scrutiny. They throw light on the emerging role of the psychologist and psychotherapist as agents of the state within the welfare system. And they question the deployment of mindfulness and other workplace 'wellness' initiatives in the place of more genuine and collective attempts to transform work.

The Work Cure is an invitation to imagine a different kind of future, where employment no longer represents the chief source of security and meaning, so integral to our well-being. It is also essential reading for anyone who has doubted whether positivity, self-improvement and 'resilience' can really be the answer to work's problems.

Chapters in the book highlight the psycho-compulsion and the intrusion of the psychotherapist as agent of the state into the workplace and the welfare system; the economic and theoretical arguments behind the concept that work and happiness are indissolubly related, and the political and ideological purpose this fallacy serves; the mental health impact of modern-day workplaces, with their zero-hours contracts, constant precarity and continual managerial scrutiny of performance, and the power of disability activism to challenge the drive to make the 'misfitting' person fit the workplace, instead of the other way round.