Recovery From Schizophrenia: Psychiatry And Political Economy

HEALTH, ILLNESS AND THE ECONOMY 45The problems, moreover, are not only to be found in the industrial workplace.Lillian Breslow Rubin wrote:There is, perhaps, no greater testimony to the deadening and deadly qualityof the tasks of the housewife than the fact that so many women findpleasure in working at jobs that by almost any definition would be calledalienated labor—low status, low-paying, dead-end work made up of dull,routine tasks; work that often is considered too menial for men who are lesseducated than these women. 92The issue of household labor may distort domestic relations. A working-classhusband insists angrily,“A wife’s got to learn to be number two. That’s the way it is, and that’swhat she better learn. She’s going to stay home and take care of the familylike a wife’s supposed to do.” 93How widespread is worker alienation? A large majority of workers in manyindustrialized countries express satisfaction with their work when polled; the sizeof this majority is always greater in higher-status jobs and older age groups. Whenasked whether they would prefer another occupation, however, as many as 60 percent of American workers say yes. 94 Arthur Kornhauser, in his study Mental Healthof the Industrial Worker, saw the expression of satisfaction with fundamentallyunfulfilling jobs as an adaptive response on the part of the workers—aconsequence “of their dwarfed desires and deadened initiative, reduction of theirgoals and restriction of their efforts to a point where life is relatively empty andonly half meaningful.” 95 The extent of alienation, therefore, is hard to measure.Reviewing the research, Marie Jahoda and Harold Rush can only conclude that:there exists a stratum of society—its size is hard to determine—of degraded,frustrated, unhappy, psychologically unhealthy people in employmentwhose personal morale is as low as their productivity, who are unable toprovide a constructive environment for their families, [and] whose lack ofcommitment in employment colors their total life experience. 96Can we estimate the psychological impact of alienating work? In his study ofDetroit factory workers, Arthur Kornhauser found a clear correlation between themental health of the worker and the skill of his job. Feelings of inadequacy,anxiety, depression and hostility were greater in those who performed the mostroutine, repetitive work. These symptoms, Kornhauser demonstrated, were notrelated to the worker’s pre-employment characteristics but were a product of thejob itself. 97 More than one study has shown that restricted independence at workis related to poor mental health. A large survey of American men representing abroad range of civilian occupations found low work complexity and close