GP chief warns WFH (working from home) could have a profound impact on Britain's mental health: Clare Gerada

article in Mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...H-profound-impact-Britains-mental-health.html

hmm

back in April

need to register for rest of article.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...line-care-has-stake-in-tech-company-5tnl9fm5f

 

So, in the time before offices, most of human history, everyone was nuts?

This couldn't be a not so subtle attempt to get the wheels back on the gravy train that 'the establishment' prefers as keeping people in little boxes, despite the environmental impact of forcing people to commute, makes their behaviour easier to control/predict, could it?

 

Why do people feel the need to pontificate in gross generalisations on this topic?

Surely any answers will depend on the nature of the work and individuals’ preferred work styles and personal circumstances. I suspect it will be hard to establish any hard and fast rules and individual decisions will be best decided by the specific employers and employees concerned.

However if energy costs continue to rise will people be rush back to the office in order to save on their heating bills, as long as their commute is not equally more expensive?

 

There is also the vested interests of owners of commercial property not wanting to see their inner city rentals decrease.

 

Complete nonsense. Why do people with extremely narrow skillsets think they are universal experts? Lots of people already worked from home. Workers are literally quitting in droves over having to return to office precisely because it's so liberating.

I worked from home for years. Absolutely loved it. Not everyone is up for it, some are social animals who crave being around others. That's their preference. And clearly this here is Gerada's personal preference, which she somehow feels the need to impose onto others as if her perspective is the universal default everyone should comply to.

Anyone familiar with labor is well aware that it's precisely this part of work that people hate the most: the long expensive commutes, awful work environments, overbearing bosses, having to show presence for the sake of showing presence, expenses that serve no purpose, horrible work politics, etc. It's widely reported that healthcare is often a bullying environment, so it even applies to healthcare, toxic work environments.

Then those words mean nothing at all. Literally just buzzwords meant to scare people. These ideologues are the real catastrophizers, obsessed with shadows and indifferent to the actual predators on the prowl.

Horrible base of the bootlicking.

 

There are some people who are indeed isolated working from home and would do better with getting back to a social (office) setting. Most kids, but not all, also.

However, that leaves out several cohorts (? the percentages) of people who need the flexibility of working from home or remotely from wherever.

Not to mention the savings of transport costs and with less air polllution.

Choice is good.

 

I know several people who were glad to be back in the office or the work field. They missed the social contact with their co-workers and clients. The exchanging of ideas that only happens with face-to-face contact. The sitting around the lunch room sharing a laugh with other people. They wanted their home life and work life to be separate. Especially for someone who lives alone and doesn't have a lot of family or friends nearby, it can become lonely not having the contact that you get through work. Working from home isn't for everyone.

 

But not for the plebs.

The general populus cannot possibly be trusted to make healthy choices for themselves without the guidance of such as Gerada. We need to 'advised' on what is best for us, we cannot possibly work it out for ourselves based on our individual circusmtances, we are far to stupid for that.

 

Downsides of going to the office have been listed in others' comments.

Also, open plan offices, those prevalent pens where employees are treated like children, are not conducive to getting the job done. Too much noise, too many distractions.

And, moments of interaction can be negative or positive. But, let's just all focus on the positive....

 

For some people it would be a profound improvement in mental health...

 

Sweeping generalisation there from SW’s wife which serves the agenda of pushing everyone back into harrowing commutes and cubicles.

 

Sure. But the opposite is true of likely far more people. Especially as work-life balance is basically the #1 issue regarding labor these days. And no one ever thinks of that because this is not about mental health, it's about very expensive offices not being used and the typical dynamic of extroverts imposing their preferences on everyone else because they are loudest. This is her personal preference and she wants everyone to comply with what she wants for herself.

People having the choice is great. But the discussion never accounts for the other way around, how for so many people this office drudgery is horrible for their quality of life. Whenever that comes up, they're told to suck it up, be adults, this is what working is about. Until the pandemic, the discussion was always 100% skewed. Now it isn't.

 

I think it's worth deconstructing the context rather than the words. Gerada of course has to be responsible for her words and her part in this particular performance but the quote from Gerada is actually quite anodyne in contrast to what the Headline claims. This kind of manipulation (headline not matching the source) is now standard practice from what is a highly politicised (both lower and upper case P) media. The Mail papers have a been waging a campaign against 'working from home' for many months.

A notable feature about the article is that it is wholly self referential - the quote is taken not from a direct interview of an informed or interestingly opinioned person (Gerada) but a podcast owned and orchestrated by the newspaper publishing the article. Again - Gerada has to be responsible for her words and her part in this performance - but this is not a simple independent report of the words of an informed or interestingly opinioned person, rather it is a media construct designed to excite the biases of the audience of one particular media group which operates for its own interests.

In addition to exciting audience biases these performative constructs are built with the express intention of provoking a reactive response in the 'non audience' thereby producing an 'opposition' to which the paying audience can respond variously with derision or a sense of oppression - what is commonly called the "woke" or "culture" wars. It's important that medical advocacy doesn't get unknowingly pulled into these confected wars.

 

From the piece's author:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1558726305641816065

 

" A lot of senior MH experts voicing concern about the shift to home-working. @ClareGerada has seen the fall out first hand in the burned-out GPs she supports"

see second article in my initial post
"Professor Dame Clare Gerada, president of the Royal College of GPs, said the shift to online consultations was the most positive development of the pandemic and anger over the switch was “a lot of noise”. Gerada owns a stake in eConsult, which provides software to about half the country’s GP surgeries and has profited hugely from Covid."