America’s economic meltdown continues for millions: Articles worth reading

The human costs of our ongoing economic crisis continue to mount. If your primary impressions of the economy are shaped by the rise in the Dow Jones Average, you might be wondering what I’m talking about. But for countless millions of others who are more concerned with the challenges of paying their bills, feeding their kids, saving for the future, and finding work, crisis remains an apt way to describe this economy.

I’ve collected a number of articles and blog posts that help us to connect the disturbing dots:

Bob’s cousin

Bob Rosner, blogging for Workplace Fairness Weekly, writes about “Broken Hearts: Unemployment’s Devastating Impact“:

Last week my cousin died of a heart attack. After working continuously for the first two-thirds of his career, recently he’d bounced from short term jobs to stretches of unemployment. This cycle is tough enough on someone just starting out a career, but for someone in their early 60′s, it can literally be a heartbreaker.

Read what he has to say about maintaining hope through the 4 “Ps”: perspective, pride, pals, and possibilities.

Profits over people — by a longshot

But hold on, it’s not as if our economy remains in complete meltdown mode. Nope, that just applies to the vast millions who are struggling to make ends meet and to secure decent work. Derek Thompson, business writer for The Atlantic, sums up the situation in meaty blog post:

Here are two things that are true about the economy today.

(1) The Dow Jones industrial average is poised to set a new record as corporate profits stretch to all-time highs.

(2) There are still fewer working Americans today than there were before the start of the Great Recession.

He goes on to explain:

When the economy crashes, we all crash together: corporate profits, employment, and growth. But when the economy recovers, we don’t recover together. Corporations rack up historic profits thanks to strong global demand, cheap global labor, and low interest rates, while American workers muddle along, their significance to these companies greatly diminished by a worldwide market for goods and people.

The forgotten

Although the official unemployment rate continues to improve very slowly, overlooked in those figures are the millions who are no longer included in the counts. Annalyn Kurtz reports for CNN.com:

An often overlooked number calculated by the Labor Department shows millions of Americans want a job but haven’t searched for one in at least a year. They’ve simply given up hope.

. . . These hopelessly unemployed workers have just been jobless so long, they’ve fallen off the main government measures altogether.

. . . Five years ago, before the recession began, about 2.5 million people said they wanted a job but hadn’t searched for one in at least a year. Now, that number is around 3.25 million.

The future of retirement

As I’ve written frequently here, the demise of retirement as a normal lifespan experience may be one of the longer-term effects of our economic condition. Steven Greenhouse, labor reporter for the New York Times, offers a thorough look at the future of retirement in the U.S.:

While retirement has assumed myriad forms across the country, many economists and other experts on retirement see some common, increasingly worrisome trends. A growing number of workers are convinced they will not have a comfortable retirement. A Boston College study in October found that 53 percent of Americans were “at risk” of being unable to maintain their pre-retirement standard of living once they retire, up from 30 percent in 1989. A study last May by the Employee Benefit Research Institute found that 44 percent may not have enough money to meet their basic needs in retirement.

Burdening next generations

As the cost of a college education continues to climb, student loan debt rises with it. Martha C. White reports for Time on the economic repercussions of massive student loan debt:

The broader economic implications are troubling. Graduates struggling to dig out from a mountain of student debt also tend to put off getting married, buying homes, and having kids. And since a bigger chunk of their income will go towards servicing the mortgages or car loans they are able to obtain at higher rates, they’ll have less spending power when they do eventually buy big-ticket items like homes and cars.

And that’s not even addressing the psychological impact of mountainous debt and reduced hopes. Cryn Johannsen of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project writes about the spectre of suicide in connection with student debt:

Suicide is the dark side of the student lending crisis and, despite all the media attention to the issue of student loans, it’s been severely under-reported. I can’t ignore it though, because I’m an advocate for people who are struggling to pay their student loans, and I’ve been receiving suicidal comments for over two years and occasionally hearing reports of actual suicides.

Inequality = more stress and illness

America’s wealth gap is widening despite the supposed economic recovery, reports Rick Newman for U.S. News & World Report:

The problem, however, is that the recession raised the bar for success while leaving fewer haves and more have-nots. America as a whole may be just as wealthy as it used to be, but the wealth is being shared by a smaller slice of the population. And that rearrangement may end up being permanent.

In this piece for BillMoyers.com, Theresa Riley interviews epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, an authority on the destructive public health consequences of societal inequality:

The pattern we’ve found in our research is quite extraordinarily clear. More unequal countries, the ones with the bigger income differences between rich and poor have much more violence, worse life expectancy, more mental illness, more obesity, more people in prison, and more teenage births. All these problems get worse with greater inequality, because it damages the social fabric of a society.

The end of the American dream?

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, assessed our economy in the context of the November election:

In this election, each side debated issues that deeply worry me: the long malaise into which the economy seems to be settling, and the growing divide between the 1 percent and the rest — an inequality not only of outcomes but also of opportunity. To me, these problems are two sides of the same coin: with inequality at its highest level since before the Depression, a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream — a good life in exchange for hard work — is slowly dying.

Stiglitz’s public policy prescriptions “include, at least, significant investments in education, a more progressive tax system and a tax on financial speculation.”

Goodbye to trickle-down economics?

The policies that led us to this widening gap between the haves vs. the have-less and the have-nots have been at least 30 years in the making, with “trickle-down economics” being the policy mantra of the era. This concept held that if wealthy people could keep more of their money and businesses could be freed of regulatory safeguards, the benefits would trickle down to everyone else. The centerpiece of trickle-down theory was that tax cuts to the wealthy would give a jump start to America’s economic engine, an assumption rebutted in a non-partisan Congressional Research Service report discussed in this Huffington Post piece.

If you’re interested in learning more, read some of these articles and start connecting the dots for yourself. We’re at a critical economic juncture in America, and the well-being of all but the most fortunate is at stake.

Raising workers’ health insurance payments for bad lifestyle habits

One of the unfortunate by-products of our messed up health care system is how some employers are raising employee health insurance contributions for those who engage in lifestyles deemed unhealthy.

They may smoke. They may eat too much or the wrong foods. They may not participate in preventive care. As Reed Abelson reported for the New York Times last November:

More and more employers are demanding that workers who smoke, are overweight or have high cholesterol shoulder a greater share of their health care costs, a shift toward penalizing employees with unhealthy lifestyles rather than rewarding good habits.

This isn’t a screed against personal responsibility. And I understand why employers are assessing options to lasso out-of-control health insurance costs.

But what I see here is a scary slippery slope, one that leads to certain individuals bearing a heavier burden of their health care costs based on the supposed riskiness of everyday conduct.

It may sound good until you apply it evenhandedly: The person who has no problem imposing higher premiums on smokers may forget that the steaks and burgers he enjoys provide reason for raising his premiums, too. And what if vegetarian who doesn’t mind sticking it the carnivore is not getting recommended amounts of protein in her diet? Does this mean that she should pony up higher payments as well?

In addition, if we’re going to play this game, what responsibility do companies that market some of these products bear for promoting these habits — the cigarette makers, fast-food restaurants, and beer companies? They know darn well that their products will have some negative health effects.

And what about bad employers that create stressful working conditions that, in turn, cause some workers to engage in less-than-healthy habits? If we’re preaching responsibility here, shouldn’t they pay a higher share of our health care costs?

Health insurance coverage helps to protect us against the costs of being human, including our own foibles and weaknesses. America remains one of the world’s wealthiest nations, and we have the capacity to provide affordable, quality health care for all. This type of business practice, however, is takes us in the opposite, more punitive, direction.

Our low “spirit level”: America ranks 27th out of 31 nations in global social justice study

Based on measures of social justice, America ranks 27th among 31 member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), according to “Social Justice in the OECD — How Do the Member States Compare?,” a report released last week by Bertelsmann Stiftung, a private German foundation.

Here are some of the low points for the U.S. in the report:

• 28th in income inequality
• 29th in poverty prevention
• 28th in child poverty
• 22nd in unemployment and long-term unemployment
• 20th in access to education
• 23rd in health care
• 25th in debt levels

In no category does the U.S. place in the higher ranks.

Overall, the four nations ranked immediately above the U.S. are Portugal, Slovakia, South Korea, and Spain. Only Greece, Chile, Mexico, and Turkey rank below the U.S.

“We should be ashamed”

New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow references the study and writes:

We have not taken care of the least among us. We have allowed a revolting level of income inequality to develop. We have watched as millions of our fellow countrymen have fallen into poverty. And we have done a poor job of educating our children and now threaten to leave them a country that is a shell of its former self. We should be ashamed.

The Times also prepared an excellent graphic that highlights selected measures in the report. The full report is only 50+ pages, with lots of easy-to-read charts and summaries.

America’s ”spirit level”

In The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (rev. ed. 2010), British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett examined comparative economic and social data and found that social and health problems worsen as inequality grows.

In fact, overall wealth is less predictive than distribution of wealth in forecasting the well-being of a populace. In terms of public health, they found that while the poor are the biggest beneficiaries of greater equality, the wealthy make gains as well. Here’s a short YouTube video of Wilkinson and Pickett explaining their book:

The U.S. fares poorly in The Spirit Level as well, mirroring the findings of the OECD study.

Conclusion

What else is there to say? America, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

“Mentally injured” vs. “mentally ill”: On changing attitudes, removing stigmas

As I will demonstrate below, I make no claim to limiting myself to politically correct terminology. However, here’s an important memo to self: Whenever applicable, use the term “mental injury” instead of “mental illness.”

During the past decade, my work in the realm of workplace bullying has provided an education in psychology and psychiatry. This has included plenty of hanging around those who study, diagnose, and heal the damage caused by psychological abuse at work. It has had a transformative effect on how I look at the law and public policy.

But my informal course of study has been far from thorough or systematic, and consequently I’m still learning the vocabulary. And oftentimes I use the term mental illness when mental injury strikes me as being much more appropriate.

Illness vs. injury

When someone is wounded by a gunshot, do we say they are “ill”? No, we say they are injured.

But what happens when, say, someone experiences violence or bullying at work so terrible that they develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Well…we’re more apt to say they’re suffering from a mental illness or disorder.

And yet, haven’t they, too, suffered an injury, a psychological trauma? So why do we use terms that unnecessarily stigmatize the person who suffers that injury?

What’s “abnormal” psychology?

While I’m at it, I also find myself questioning the term “abnormal psychology.” Writer and educator Kendra Cherry defines the term this way:

Abnormal psychology is a branch of psychology that deals with psychopathology and abnormal behavior. The term covers a broad range of disorders, from depression to obsession-compulsion to sexual deviation and many more. Counselors, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists often work directly in this field.

Here again, a similar point: So many conditions labeled “abnormal” — such as depression triggered by situations in one’s life — strike me as being natural responses to difficult experiences and setbacks. (And on the extreme end, there’s nothing abnormal about suffering PTSD after doing two tours of duty in Iraq.)

Unnecessarily stigmatizing terms

Over the past decade, some of the most insightful and empathetic people I’ve met include those who have suffered from depression, PTSD, and other conditions triggered or exacerbated by horrible experiences at work.

By contrast — with apologies for my lack of precise terminology  – some of the most screwed up, uptight people I’ve ever met would likely get clean bills of health from therapists or psychiatrists.

Terms like “mental illness” and “abnormal” scare people. They create in our minds a fearful Other. My friends holding doctorates in psychology may have plenty of good reasons to tell me I’m wrong, but I’d really like us to think about how we use these labels.

The “pseudoscience” card as intellectual bullying

If you’re in the scientific biz and you really don’t like what someone else is doing or saying, one of the easiest cards to play is the”pseudoscience” card, especially if the object of your scorn challenges accepted orthodoxies. The tag can be devastatingly effective and stick for a long time.

Some people commit big chunks of their careers to taking down the work of others in this way. For example, Stephen Barrett is the founder of Quackwatch, a site devoted to the relentless criticism of alternative medicine and natural health care and their providers, as a 2008 piece in the Village Voice reports.

Not so easy

Of course, there are quacks, charlatans, and frauds out there who masquerade as having knowledge, evidence, and expertise they simply don’t possess. They should be called on it.

But on other occasions, playing the pseudoscience card is a form of intellectual (or is it anti-intellectual?) bullying. It’s a way of diminishing work that threatens or questions accepted theory and practice.

Michael Shermer, in a piece for the Scientific American titled “What is Pseudoscience?” (link here), recognizes that the lines between science and pseudoscience are not as easily drawn as one might think. But rather than simply railing against the difficulties of doing so, he sets out a fair minded way of making the distinction. Shermer asks:

…(D)oes the revolutionary new idea generate any interest on the part of working scientists for adoption in their research programs, produce any new lines of research, lead to any new discoveries, or influence any existing hypotheses, models, paradigms or world views? If not, chances are it is pseudoscience.

On the other hand:

If a community of scientists actively adopts a new idea and if that idea then spreads through the field and is incorporated into research that produces useful knowledge reflected in presentations, publications, and especially new lines of inquiry and research, chances are it is science.

Fear and intolerance

Two years ago, I saw just how strongly the scientific and public health establishment can react to challenges of conventional wisdom when two very reputable health journalists were skewered because they dared to report on research that questioned the efficacy of flu vaccines. Their article appeared in The Atlantic just as the country was facing the H1N1 flu virus.

The harshest criticisms of The Atlantic piece came from the mainstream health sector, but a lot of others with no apparent scientific or medical expertise jumped on board. For example, one prominent law professor, apparently beset by fear and rage, blogged that “many people will get sick and some may even die because these two are too stupid to be able to analyze and evaluate the relevance of evidence,” adding that the authors were “dangerously stupid” and “irresponsible hacks.”

Not too long ago, doctors appeared in ads and commercials touting low-tar menthol cigarettes. Over the years, those trying to lose a few pounds have been alternately urged to eat more meat or less meat, more pasta or less pasta. Soldiers without visible wounds who could not return to the front lines were once deemed “shellshocked.”

In other words, we don’t have to return to the Middle Ages to find plenty of examples where conventional scientific wisdom was simply wrong. We are not even close to reaching the outer frontiers of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. That awareness hopefully brings with it a humility that gives us pause before we engage in facile putdowns of cutting-edge work.

Dignity amidst horrific indignity: A job shoveling s**t in the Łódź Ghetto

In the Łódź Ghetto of German-occupied Poland during the Second World War, Harold Bursztajn’s father could’ve received extra protections and privileges by agreeing to serve on the ghetto’s Jewish police force, which the Nazis used to control the local populace. Because he didn’t want to become so directly complicit with his oppressors, he declined.

Instead of receiving special treatment to keep his neighbors in line, the elder Bursztajn was put to work as a “fecalist,” a person who collected their droppings. Fecalists were given no protective clothing, no masks, and no gloves, and many had to work without shoes.

It is difficult to imagine how abominably dirty and disgusting the job must have been. Because they reeked with the smell of their work, the fecalists became the untouchables (or at least the “unapproachables”) of the ghetto.

Why this job?

The job was not meant solely to demean. You see, none of the thousands of apartments in the Łódź Ghetto had indoor plumbing, and there was no public sewage system to speak of. Risk of infectious diseases ran rampant. However, because Łódź was a manufacturing city that provided forced labor to fuel the Nazi war machine, keeping these people alive — at least until they had nothing left to give — was a high priority.

Thus emerged a perverse convergence of interests. The Jews wanted to survive, and the Nazis needed their labor. Out of nothing, a public health system emerged. At presumably the lowest rung of this system came the folks whose job was to remove the mounds of human waste that posed the threat of deadly disease.

How they made a difference

The fecalists may have stank, but they used this to their advantage: The Germans, too, gave them wide berth, which meant that they could smuggle information and small amounts of supplies without fear of being searched.

And, lest we forget, their work saved lives — however temporarily in view of the eventual fates of ghetto residents. Fatalities from infectious diseases dropped precipitously once this improvised public health system took shape, and the fecalists became part of the first line of defense by providing more sanitary living conditions for those in the ghetto.

A remarkable panel

This summary does not come close to adequately conveying the fascinating depth of this story and others that were part of a gripping panel on health care, medical ethics, and public health in the German-occupied Jewish ghettos, presented at the biennial Congress of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health, hosted this week by Berlin’s Humboldt University.

The story of the fecalists came from Dr. Harold Bursztajn of the Harvard Medical School, co-founder of its Program in Psychiatry & the Law. He shared it with passion, animation, and even humor. The only time he became visibly upset is when he recounted how his father saved a woman from being transported to the east to face almost certain death at an extermination camp. The father argued that she also was a fecalist and thus served too valuable a role to send away.

The woman, pulled off the train minutes before it was scheduled to depart, was Harold’s mother.

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Thank you to Harold Bursztajn and to his fellow panelists — Tessa Chelouche (Israel), Geoffrey Brahmer (Boston), and Jacob Holzer (Boston) — for their excellent presentations. This blog post could’ve gone on for pages, and I plan to write again about another of the presentations.

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Go here for more about the history of the Łódź Ghetto.

Bullying across the lifespan: In senior facilities, too

We know all about school bullying and workplace bullying. Now, sadly, we can talk about bullying in senior homes.

Like junior high

Paula Span, blogging for the New York Times (link here), reports:

This phenomenon, a sort of social bullying, apparently comes as no surprise to administrators of senior apartments, assisted living facilities, nursing homes and senior centers. “What happens to mean girls? Some of them go on to become mean old ladies,” said Marsha Frankel, clinical director of senior services at Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Boston, who has led workshops (innocuously called “Creating a Caring Community”) for staff and residents.

Span quotes a woman whose mother was bullied in an assisted care facility, referring to the behaviors as exclusionary and cliquish, much like junior high school.

Bullying across the lifespan

We need to keep connecting the dots. Bullying doesn’t stop once folks leave high school.

There is no one-size-fits-all response. Combinations of education, counseling, training, and legal intervention must be tailored to fit the various settings in which bullying occurs.

But it starts with acknowledging the ubiquity of these behaviors throughout our lives.

Maryland coalition

An example of this expansive approach is the Montgomery County [Maryland] Coalition for the Prevention of Bullying and Related Health Risks, an informal coalition of mental health providers and educators formed three years ago to address bullying behaviors.

Coalition members have been active in supporting legislation and public policy initiatives in Maryland that address bullying issues, especially within the schools.

Co-founder Dr. Jorge Srabstein of Children’s Medical Center in Washington D.C. has been promoting understanding of “bullying across the lifespan” as a way of grasping how abusive behaviors start at a young age and endure through our senior years, and the Coalition is a living manifestation of that commitment.

Brain science and the workplace: Neuroscience and neuroplasticity

If you’re interested in how the experience of work affects us, but you’re not into heavy science, get over the latter and become familiar with these two terms: Neuroscience and neuroplasticity. We’re going to be hearing a lot about both in the years to come.

Definitions

Neuroscience is defined by MedicineNet.com as:

The study of the brain and nervous system, including molecular neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, psychophysics, computational modeling and diseases of the nervous system.

Neuroplasticity is defined as:

The brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life. Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.

In other words, we’re talking about the science of the brain, including how we can change it for the better and fix it after bad stuff happens.

Past blog posts

I try to avoid using too much jargon in writing articles for this blog, so the following pieces are not filled to the brim with references to neuroscience and neuroplasticity. Nonetheless, these concepts are at the heart of these posts:

In recovering from adversity, past adversity can fuel our resilience

Do organizations suppress our empathy?

Understanding the bullied brain

Bully rats, tasers, and stress

Why concentrated power at work is bad

Huge implications for workplace bullying

As the titles of the posts listed above suggest, this has huge implications for understanding and responding to workplace bullying.

Neuroscience gives us tools for understanding what workplace bullying does to people. For example, last year Dr. Gary Namie wrote on the Workplace Bullying Institute blog about a promising experimental tool for diagnosing Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (link here):

Prolonged exposure to unremitting stress damages a person’s health. . . . In worst cases, trauma can result. . . . Now comes a potential new neuroscience tool to complement the diagnostic toolkit — MEG. MEG stands for magnetoencephalography. PTSD can be detected with 97% accuracy using this non-invasive, but still experimental, procedure.  MEG measures the magnetic signals produced by the activity of the brain.

Similarly, emerging understanding of neuroplasticity — in this context, applying insights to help counsel and heal bullying targets — gives us hope for breakthroughs toward helping those with PTSD, a condition so difficult to treat that often has left even the most optimistic trauma experts in a state of frustration.

Legal significance

Words not only can hurt, but also when delivered in a malicious, sustained, and targeted way, they can impair brain functioning. In short, psychological torture causes brain damage. Thus, as these discoveries and developments become documented through published scientific research, neuroscience will help targets of bullying, harassment, mobbing, and abuse prove legal claims against their tormenters. It also will help them access workers’ compensation and disability benefits.

Organizational behavior and business practices

Insights from neuroscience increasingly will inform the study of organizational behavior and business management practices. In an article for Strategy + Business about neuroscience and organizational culture (link here, free registration), Jeffrey Schwartz, Pablo Gaito, and Doug Lennick wrote:

When corporate leaders talk about change, they usually have a desired result in mind . . .. They know that if they are to achieve this result, people throughout the company need to change their behavior and practices, and that can’t happen by simple decree. How, then, does it happen? In the last few years, insights from neuroscience have begun to answer that question. New behaviors can be put in place, but only by reframing attitudes that are so entrenched that they are almost literally embedded in the physical pathways of employees’ neurons.

A next big thing

So folks, this is a Next Big Thing. Stay tuned, because we’re going to be learning a lot of interesting stuff about ourselves, and this knowledge may lead us to ways of improving our lives at work and elsewhere.

The costs of suffering in silence about bad work situations

Let’s say you’re being bullied or harassed or otherwise mistreated at work. Or maybe you’ve just learned that you’re being horribly underpaid compared to the less-than-stellar fellow in the next office or cubicle.

Anger and resentment are natural responses to these situations, but is there any outlet to express your emotions at work?

Bottled up

Many people — dare I say most people — will keep it bottled up inside them.

After all, self-censorship has long been a staple of behavior for the rank-and-file worker. And during tough economic times, folks often reason (with good justification) that it’s better to internalize their bad feelings rather than express them.

Health impacts

Repressing these emotions can have grave health consequences, however.

Dr. Gabor Maté, an expert on the relationship of emotions to overall health, discussed the links between expression of emotions and immune system impairments in a recent interview with Amy Goodman published on Alternet (link here):

Women who don’t know how to express their boundaries emotionally, they suppress their boundaries immunologically, and therefore they’re more likely to develop disease. The same is true, of course, of men, so that the immune system is in constant interaction with our emotional responses.

…In another study with the immune system, medical students under the stress of examination were found to have diminished activity of their natural killer cells, these immune cells. But those students who were emotionally isolated were most likely to have diminished activity of their immune system.

In a post last year (link here), I cited a Swedish study indicating that when men repress their anger over unfair treatment at work, their risk of having a heart attack or dying of heart disease doubles.

Bringing it home

Unfortunately, what is bottled up at work sometimes bubbles over at home.

Contrary to common advice, it’s not always easy to “leave it at the office.”  How much pent up frustration stored up during the workday is dished out toward family members and friends? And how often does displaced anger directed toward spouses and kids reach abusive levels?

One-way boxing match

The state of employment law promotes remaining silent, at least for the vast majority of workers who are not protected by collective bargaining agreements. When I first started researching legal protections against workplace bullying and restrictions on employee free speech, I realized very quickly that when it comes to expression at work, it’s a one-way boxing match.

In other words, a supervisor can yell and scream at an underling and usually get away with it, but if the underling acts in the same way, she can be disciplined or fired and the law often will say it’s legal.

Bottom line

We also know how this affects the one thing even bad companies embrace, the holy bottom line. When employees feel mistreated, they are less loyal and productive and more likely to bolt once anything resembling a better job comes along. Stress-related absenteeism and higher health care costs also are a part of the mix.

Public health problem

Workplace bullying, harassment, and other forms of abuse are more than “just” employment problems. We need to teach everyone that these are public health problems as well.

Here in the U.S. (and in many other countries as well), the ways in which we address and resolve differences at work are simply broken. Top-down, command & control management structures produce these situations like an assembly line, and employment laws and dispute resolution procedures do not encourage doing anything differently. When stress inducing, anger producing mistreatment at work continues to be written off as part of the everyday cost of having a job, the negative public health impacts will ripple out over and again.

Workplace bullying, stress, and fibromyalgia

Over the past few weeks I’ve had conversations, in person and online, with three women who have been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and each has experienced severe bullying and heavy-duty stress at work. If you’re unfamiliar with fibromyalgia, here’s a chance to learn something about it.

Fibromyalgia is a chronic, disabling medical condition marked by widespread pain and fatigue that afflicts women far more often than men. Compared to many other serious maladies, research on fibromyalgia is an early work in progress, but we’re learning a lot about it. According to the Mayo Clinic:

Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition characterized by widespread pain in your muscles, ligaments and tendons, as well as fatigue and multiple tender points — places on your body where slight pressure causes pain.

Fibromyalgia occurs in about 2 percent of the population in the United States. Women are much more likely to develop the disorder than are men, and the risk of fibromyalgia increases with age. Fibromyalgia symptoms often begin after a physical or emotional trauma, but in many cases there appears to be no triggering event.

In other words, we’re talking about severe, ongoing pain and the power of a knockout punch.

Gender implications

The gender implications of fibromyalgia are significant. Let’s juxtapose some numbers: If the Mayo Clinic is correct in stating that fibromyalgia will occur in 2 percent of the population, and if studies such as this one suggesting that 9 in 10 sufferers are female are even close to hitting the mark, then we have a hidden epidemic among women.

Bullying connection

The Workplace Bullying Institute recognizes that fibromyalgia can be a consequence of workplace bullying (link here). Research is making the link: For example, a 2008 study led by Canadian researcher Sandy Hershcovis (news coverage, here) found that workplace bullying targets were more likely to develop fibromyalgia. A 2004 study led by Finnish researcher Mika Kivimaki (abstract, here), found that stress at work “seems to be a contributing factor in the development of fibromyalgia.”

Anecdotally, here’s a blog post from a nurse manager who suffers from fibromyalgia and is grasping the link to her experiences of bullying at work:

But, it is affecting my health.  She is a bully and she wants me out of the office- end of discussion.  How do you deal with people like this?  Just this morning, there walks one of her patients right into our office.  Do I say anything, like “See, you have patients in here!”  No, I did not say a thing!  I just turned around and kept working!  I think that is why some of us are so sick!

Connections to law reform

The bullying/fibromyalgia connection bolsters the argument for legal reform. When the Healthy Workplace Bill is enacted into law, a diagnosis of fibromyalgia may be sufficient to establish a showing of physical harm in support of a legal claim.

Furthermore, the fibromyalgia/bullying connection relates to the work of two Florida law professors who have been writing on other aspects workplace bullying and the law:

• Professor Susan Harthill of Florida Coastal School of Law has written about possible applications of occupational safety and health law to workplace bullying (abstract, here).
• Professor Kerri Stone of Florida International University College of Law has written about how workplace bullying has discriminatory impact on women, even if on its face it is an “equal opportunity” form of mistreatment (abstract, here).

Sadly, it’s not as if we need to add another disabling condition to the list of those that can result from workplace bullying. Nevertheless, the more we understand the destructive nature of bullying, the stronger our arguments will be to respond to it.

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Note: Both Susan Harthill and Kerri Stone are scheduled to present on a panel about workplace bullying & the law with me, Dr. Gary Namie of the Workplace Bullying Institute, and Prof. Lea Vaughn of the University of Washington Law School at the biennial Congress of the International Academy of Law and Mental Health (link here) next July in Berlin.