Well-Being and Creative Careers
Outline of the Book
In 2025, my new book Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick comes out with Intellect Books in the UK and elsewhere.
[this is not the cover of the book - a temporary mockup by the designer]
The book documents my research, starting in 2018, on the mental (and physical) health and well-being of people at work in the media. The project covers professionals in journalism, film/ TV/ cinema/ documentary, advertising/ marketing communication/ public relations, digital games, music/ recording/ performance, and online content creation/ social media. It includes a review of reports, studies and interviews from all over the world and across various professions.
For an early overview of all the key issues covered in the book, please download and check out the open-access paper "What Makes You Happy Also Makes You Sick: Mental Health and Well-Being in Media Work" published (open-access) in the International Journal of Communication in January 2025. All the information on my ongoing work regarding health and well-being in the media is archived at the Center of Open Science.
From the Preface of the book, here is the overall summary and outline of the overall argument - that the elements of what makes so many people happy and thankful to be pursuing a creative career are exactly what can make professionals sick to the extent of burning out and leaving the work that they love.
In the opening chapter, I tackle the issue of why industry reports and trade publications across the different media professions in recent years all talk about a ‘mental health crisis’ that affects everyone at work.
As key stressors in media work, I emphasize the intensity and volatility of the work, the limited professionalization of management and ways of working in the sector, and the profound role passion plays in creative careers. While awareness about the importance of health and well-being in the workplace is rising worldwide, a characteristic aspect of the creative career is that practitioners so embody their labor, identify with their craft, and, in a way, ‘become’ their work. This is why it can be exceptionally difficult to relate effectively to potentially problematic aspects of the industry.
The all-important “so what” and “why now” questions are subsequently asked and answered in Chapter 2.
I outline the ethical duty of care stakeholders in creative careers – from policymakers, owners and directors to co-workers and educators, up to and including the audience. Emphasizing issues such as dignity and autonomy at work, a detailed discussion follows about the prevalence of transgressive behavior – such as bullying, abuse, discrimination and toxicity – in the media industry. While these concerns are not necessarily new, what makes them pertinent is a cocktail of growing mental health awareness worldwide, the pandemic, changing meanings and expectations of work, and the rise of social media (including new social movements such as MeToo and BlackLivesMatter).
Before digging deeper, in the third chapter I engage the issue of defining what we talk about when we talk about health, well-being and happiness at work (in the media).
Acknowledging our generally limited knowledge about health and well-being and how inaccurate we often are in interpreting and acting on our feelings, I move on to define health in an integrated way – including mental, physical and spiritual elements – and suggest approaches to well-being at work that include both individual and social parameters. In other words, it is not enough for a well-rounded conceptualization of health and well-being to simply have fun, nor does doing meaningful work suffice. An integrated, complete definition of healthy work and being happy on the job not only means that working conditions are conducive to people not getting sick nor being stigmatized for sometimes struggling, but also includes professionals doing well, being valued and recognized, experiencing autonomy and having agency at work.
Armed with concepts and context, the focus turns to the corpus at the heart of my overall argument: a narrative review of hundreds of reports, white papers and industry and academic studies on well-being at work.
The overview covers six key professional groups: advertising (including marketing communications and public relations), music (including performing and recording), film and television (including cinema), digital games, social media entertainment (and online content creation), and journalism. A word of warning: the numbers regarding the levels of distress and pain are, at times, overwhelming, disturbing and distressing. The overview cannot escape the conclusion that the very industry that people choose to be part of is what makes them sick.
In Chapter 5 I take a first stab at explaining why things at work in the media are – or can be – so harmful to people’s health and well-being.
Essentially, understanding media work requires an appreciation of how ambivalent and paradoxical everything about a creative career in these industries is. While so many practitioners clearly struggle or even suffer at work, the same or even greater number of people express being so happy and grateful for a chance to pursue their creative career. Industry lore and vocational awe conspire to make the creative career escape meaningful critique and this turns any problems people may have into personal and private ones. Still, seeing the work in these anomalous terms allows me to tie in discussions about the cultural sectors’ lack of diversity, struggle with innovation, and overall precarity to the mental health crisis in media work.
Taking a step back, the next chapter tickles my fancy as a historian at heart, tracing the genealogy of work-related stress and lack of well-being across the various industries under investigation.
In doing so, I emphasize the significance of love throughout all the accounts of what it is like - what it feels like – to pursue a creative career (in the media). Getting to do what you love as a job and career can set people up to fail, as whatever happens, people still feel thankful to be given a chance. Despite being paid poorly, treated unfairly, and having little or no control over one’s future, so many artists, creators, writers, actors, programmers and developers still insist that what they do for a living is not really ‘work’ at all. The problem is: the work does not love you back.
This sets up the link between reported health and well-being issues across all media professions with the insights gained from the field of occupational medicine, which explains what it is about work-related psychosocial stressors that make people sick.
In short, three key factors together exhibit the largest increased risk of occurrences of disorders: lack of reciprocity, low organizational justice, and unusually high job demands. The analysis of these factors (in Chapter 7) follows the central themes across the industry and scholarly literature on creative careers: people’s unconditional love for the work, the precarious experience of the work, and how these professionals turn to unhealthy and otherwise problematic ways of coping with the work.
In the concluding chapter, I synthesize what I have learned from doing the research for this book, using my writing about it as a method to explore the full range of making sense of people’s health and well-being in media work.
Specifically, I address the cruel optimism that makes professionals come back for more, even though they know or feel that this may make them sick. In all of this, I have a hopeful point of view regarding the different ways people, organizations, industries, and policymakers act to remedy the situation affecting all. It must be clear that I am not offering prescriptions for how things should be – in so many ways I am documenting what is already known and what efforts are undertaken to improve workers’ autonomy, support their well-being, and enable practitioners to do the kind of work that matters to them. The book ends with celebrating the life-affirming and transformative power of love that people feel for their work and for turning their creativity into a career in the media. Perhaps love is the most radical of all the positions I consider and explore throughout this project.