Well-Being and Creative Careers

There is a well-documented mental health crisis among media professionals around the world - in journalism, advertising/marketing/PR, film and television, digital games, music (recording and performance), and online content creation. This book documents what is particular about well-being in creative careers in the media, offers an analysis of systemic issues throughout the media industries that explain why so many practitioners get sick on the job, and shows what can be done. The health crisis in the media industry consists of mental issues with extraordinary high instances of anxiety, trauma, burnout, and depression; physical ailments - prevalent substance abuse, unhealthy living, sleep problems, and exhaustion; and spiritual problems including people experiencing moral injury at work, and suffering from a loss of morale. At the same time, most media professionals claim to be happy doing what they do, suggesting that what makes people happy can also make them sick. What ends up causing work-related stress disorders is a combination of a lack of reciprocity between what people bring to the job, and what the industry offers in return, organizational injustice as people perceive policies and decisions at work to be discriminatory and unfair, and persistent high workloads.