Capitalism Makes You Sick

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence have calculated the cost of stress related workplace absence at £28bn. That figure being a total derived from the 13 million working days lost a year to depression and other mental illness.

Apparently lousy managers were the single biggest problem but such simple solutions as thanking someone for a job well done or flexible working could significantly reduce the problem.

A system which induces people to forget such simple things as manners surely has to be rotten to the core. But I interject...

Another recent survey by the Chartered Institue of Personnel and Development confirmed these findings: "a quarter of UK workers describe their mental health as moderate or poor, yet nearly all continued to work regularly."

So the constant pressure to produce, coupled with the recession, the bad debts and whatever else baggage you're carrying does not a happy worker make. But that's OK. The system can patch you up with anti-depressants, not fix you mind, and send you back out to work. By the millions. Apart from the unemployed of course, who are a faceless commodity under capitalism, an unpalatable necessity useful only for their role in the supression of wages (full employment not being desirous you see).

The fact that it is individuals, and their friends and families, who are suffering is lost somehow in the fact that someone had to slap a figure on it to make it easier for the businessmen to understand.


Can anyone really say they are surprised by (yet) another survey which showed that Monday was the most common sick day? I'm no doctor but if I had to put money on it...

The research showed that 35% of all sick leave is taken on a Monday. We're not all exactly leaping out of bed to get there then. Researcher Phiroze Bilimoria said: "Monday sickness and frequent short-term absences can be a symptom of low employee engagement and morale within certain teams or departments."


As long as we endure in a state of endless, mindless, soulless, production and consumption through to the eventual destruction of the planet according to the economic laws of low wages, debt, privatisation and the free market and the states laws of surveillance, force, coercion and bribery then I suspect there will always be mental health and employment reforms to discuss.

Capitalism as a possible cause is unlikely to be bought up.