ABSTRACT
This book is about people who have suffered psychiatric breakdown and the work they have subsequently done. There are many divisions of opinion about the nature and value of work as experienced by employees in industrial societies. To those who embrace the protestant ethic, it can be a passport to heaven. To those who subscribe to the conclusions of the sociologist Robert Dubin (1956), it is not a central life interest at all. Probably of more relevance to a discussion of the value of work for mentally ill people are the findings of those who have researched the concept of job satisfaction. One salient point is that job satisfaction in the intrinsic nature of work itself has been found to vary with occupation and social class; Blauner (1960) listing the percentages of workers who, given the chance, would choose the same work again, reported that over 80 per cent of mathematicians, lawyers, and journalists would do so, compared with under 22 per cent of unskilled car and steel workers. If such findings are related to the resettlement of mentally ill people, it is unrealistic to expect ex-patients from Social Class V to revel in the nature of the unskilled work that may have been found for them, when this is not the common reaction of their healthy fellows. But, and this is important, this is not to say that they may not derive overriding satisfaction from the mere fact of working at all. Theorists will recognize that for them, as for many low-skilled workers, a job will carry John Goldthorpe’s (1968) ‘instrumental’ value; that is to say, it will be the instrument whereby they are able to provide themselves with compensating satisfactions, whether by purchasing goods or services or by financing the pursuit of alternative interests outside work. The first reason, then, why mentally ill people need to work is the same as it is for everybody; to procure themselves cash and satisfaction.
