Techniques of Industrial Therapy, Ergotherapy, and Recreative Methods

TLDR: Work has a significant effect on a person's life, his psychological state or his illness, and it is not easily incorporated into the treatment and management of the psychiatrically ill as mentioned in this paper.

Abstract: While work has a significant effect on a person’s life, his psychological state or his illness, it is not easily incorporated into the treatment and management of the psychiatrically ill. Doctors and nurses tend to believe that the sick need rest, not labour. They and the public often equate work with industrialisation and confuse it with a dehumanised assembly line and piecework model of human relations. This view is oversimple, for it neglects the equally dehumanising effects of idleness and unemployment. By using work to help people to adapt in society, one does not endorse society’s norms nor expect people to conform to them. To adapt socially is to be able to deal with the complexities of everyday living. Such adaptation may lead to wealth or poverty, happiness or unhappiness or may involve attacking, neglecting or upholding the established social order. It may be more important to adjust to family life than to work pr leisure, although for economic and social reasons both are very intimately related to family adjustment. Everyone has views on work. It is not only protestants who subscribe to what is known as “the protestantwork ethic”, or non-protestants who have visions of work in dark, satanic mills.