Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Work-Related Suffering in Germany

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sabine Flick
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 457133197

In recent decades, significant changes have occurred in the world of employment. These transformations have an impact on the mental health of workers, which is threatened by distinctly stressful psychosocial work environments. The urgency of this problem has led to increased social demands, particularly in terms of care and a rising demand for clinical psychotherapy. It is not merely that work can influence the onset of mental health problems; the conditions of work make it difficult to behave in a health-conscious manner and be aware of health impairments and signs of illness in a timely and appropriate fashion. Even diseases that have their “cause” in the private sphere or a person’s life story can manifest themselves at work, so their “treatability” is also influenced by the conditions of work. How is the relationship of mental health and work addressed in clinical institutions? The existing studies show that work as an important dimension within the treatment is often neglected and disappears in the course of the professional appropriation and translation into the psychotherapeutic patterns of interpretation. Moreover, the therapeutic practice is individualizing and privatizing the patient's work-related suffering. Lastly, the way, work is addressed in the course of the treatment is strongly biased: gendered ideas about ‘normal’ work and heteronormative patterns of interpretations are guiding the way therapists look at the working conditions of their patients as do assumptions of the patient’s social class background, moreover, ideas and knowledge, or rather the lack of knowledge, about different fields of occupation are coining the concepts of work and also the idea, of what is considered “work” at all. The research project therefore analyses how this turning away from the issue of work and the way the suffering is attributed to gender, class and occupation is taking place exactly. The project addresses these questions within the frame of a qualitative empirical research. We focus on the health professionals as member of the institution's multiprofessional teams and their theories of work. The overall objective of the research is the development of a typology of psychotherapeutic understanding of work-related suffering based on the reconstruction of theories of practice. Aside from this overarching goal, there are a number of aims of the project which are necessary steps for the development of the typology of concepts of work that can be categorized as follows: Understanding collective theories of work- and work-related suffering within the context of clinical treatment and potential differences in acute hospitals and rehabilitation clinics. Understanding potential differences within the psychotherapeutic paradigms (behavioral, psychodynamic and systemic). And finally we aim at an understanding the potential differences within the therapeutic teams.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants