Psychiatrists' Emotional Labor

Paper Summary:

This paper describes the emotional labor involved in being a psychiatrist. It takes as a starting point Hochschild's study of flight attendants, "The Managed Heart", which describes the difference between emotional labor systems and private emotional systems. The paper describes two distinct contexts of psychiatric emotional labor: diagnostic and therapeutic.

From the Paper:

"From a historical perspective, the phrase "emotional labor" is strange because it suggests that things that occur naturally to us in our daily lives might constitute "work." If this is true, is our everyday eating "nutritional labor," or chatting with friends "social labor"? Yet in many fields, empathy and other proper emotional responses to others are a necessary job task to be fulfilled on demand. This demand characteristic marks the difference between labor and non-labor: labor is doing that which is required of us, whether or not we want to do it, while non-labor is doing what we want to do, whether or not we are required to."

More papers on Psychiatrists' Emotional Labor:

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