Employers are increasingly delivering initiatives that focus on improving the mental health of their workers. But are these initiatives just virtue signaling? Are they asking the individual employee to heal themselves while excusing the employer from having to make any systemic changes to a stressful or exploitative workplace? And do they even improve any outcomes?
According to a new study, individual mental well-being interventions delivered by employersālike resilience training, mindfulness, and wellābeing appsādonāt actually help workers to feel any better. And they may obscure the systemic workplace problems that lead to poor employee mental health in the first place.
The study was conducted by William J. Fleming at the Wellbeing Research Centre, University of Oxford, UK, and published in Industrial Relations Journal.
āThe results in this article pose a challenge to the popularity and legitimacy of individual-level mental wellābeing interventions like mindfulness, resilience and stress management, relaxation classes and wellābeing apps. I find little evidence in support of any benefits from these interventions with even some small indication of harm that would confirm fears from critics,ā Fleming writes.
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āIt seems premature to recommend individualālevel interventions to all workers (e.g. NICE, 2022). I concur with reviewers of the field that organizational interventions, such as changes to scheduling, management practices, staff resources, performance review or job design, appear more beneficial for improving wellābeing.ā
Completely agree.
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We live in a world, not in an individual which is just an idea, and it was produced by the way authority without love, like slavery or serfdom or psychiatry or the policeman or the parental negation made you feel. But we live in a singular reality within which all is. There are not 8 billion realities, but one reality within which 8 billion confused brains are conditioned by the totally fictitious idea of the ‘individual’ with their ‘individual responsibility’, which lets the whole destructive, blind social-historical process totally off the hook.
The social-historical process is one total subsystem within a greater system called Mother Nature that this subsystem has come to dominate. No-one can deny that. So which single human is responsible for this total system that made all of us and continues to remake us as exactly what we are from moment to moment? Your decisions are socially conditioned neurological acitvity driven by a billion fine and delicate feelings, impulses and instincts that are Mother Nature enslaved by this conditioning, just as the Earth is enslaved by civilization, though they are not in any way different. The human being, i.e. the seeing feeling being with brain, heart, body, IS Mother Nature. The capturing of this human by the social process and conditioning of their brain and thought and life activity IS Mother Nature enslaved by civilization. So to choose society over nature is to choose alien death over what we are, which is the living Earth whose freedom, perfection and beauty we have destroyed for McDonald’s and Donald Trump and a society of vampires who believe in absurd and evil conspiracy theories most of whom own guns and a third of whom want a civil war. These are simple, pertinant facts people, not extreme rantings. You ought to question yourselves, not these clear and undeniable facts, and question why you aren’t throwing up when these facts are pointed out to you. Don’t worry – it’s not you. It’s the defensive mechanisms in your brain, conditioned by this society which protects itself through you.
The total system of the Universe contains the subsystems of galaxy, solar system, Earth, nature, humanity and it’s cage, and you introduce another, which is the individual in their cage. But the individual in their cage is an abstraction from humanity in its cage, and one has to understand the former as the structure of the latter, otherwise we will think we are selves rather then the vast process that constitutes us all.
When you talk about my life, what truth does this have? What is ‘my life’? There is only awareness and everything within, so where is this ‘my’, and what is this ‘life’? Isn’t awareness and the happenings within, which is all that ever is for you, isn’t this your life AND your world AND your whole existence and all possible existence? So what is this I, me or mine? Purely thought, which is socially conditioned linguistic representation for things that, if you examine the only actuality (awareness of what is), are total and utter, demonstrable, clear social conceptual fictions we take to be the real. And you can see the same in humanity as a whole. If you look at the total process, you see a whole world of human beings acting in similar ways as a total process which grows, reproduces and maintains itself with innumerable processes, and ownership and the idea of individuality are merely conceptual fictions used to organize the movements of social life in accordance with the total system. Actually, every animal will tell you, this is my Earth, and I didn’t agree to it being chopped up and sold with utterly disastrous consequences for us all.
But if you can’t see that you are not an individual, and that to believe we are individuals is the tragedy of our times, then please, don’t worry. Carry on dreaming. Probably you will never wake up. Because the world is the world, not you, which is the social diminution of what you are into a disempowered and separated, enslaved part. And we unconsciously condition our children to become the same, worse then cogs in the machine. They are animals in the farm producing the destructive demands of American power and greed. So what if some of the pigs become lame or die in their pen. It’s a cost effective operation nonetheless (for everyone except 90% of humanity and the whole entire Earth).
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I have said this before when I’ve seen these initiatives started within the healthcare system. I work at a hospital and have worked within various institutional settings over the years. Some of the main problems that require addressing are systemic racism, pay disparities, understaffing, no time for proper supervisory practices, and administrations that are removed from direct patient care. Staff don’t have time to access personal wellness when they can’t pay bills, can’t spend time with family because they need more than one job, and have to pay additional expenses for healthcare.
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