Suffering in Silence: Work and Mental Health Experiences among Provincial Correctional Workers in Canada

ABSTRACT

In the course of their duties, correctional employees face exposure to a variety of potentially psychologically traumatic events (PPTEs). Recent research points to an array of consequences of work experiences on the psychological well-being of correctional staff, including the development of mental health disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder, general anxiety disorder, and major depressive disorder. Drawing on an open-ended survey response among provincial and territorial correctional employees (n = 269) in Canada, we consider the experiences of correctional employees who self-report an anxiety, mood, or other mental health disorder, with a particular focus on how such experiences are tied to work conditions and occupational environments. Findings demonstrate that, for many, mental health struggles are intimately tied to both operational and organizational factors – the former referring to job duties and the latter referring to social relations of work. How mental health status is navigated is intimately shaped by occupational norms and meanings tied to mental health, namely stigma. Despite the perceived link between work and mental health outcomes, mental health suffering is understood and responded to as a private problem – with fallout on the personal lives and welfare of staff. We discuss the implications of training paradigms and general understandings of mental health responsibility.

KEYWORDS:

• Occupational mental health
• mental disorders
• responsibility
• emotional labor
• correctional workers

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Mental health resiliency refers to the characteristics and processes that allow people to cope with psychological adversity and return to previous levels of well-being and functioning (Christopher et al., 2018; Lee et al., 2013). The concept of mental health resiliency has been sharply critiqued by scholars working within the paradigm of critical disability studies. For example, Voronka (2019) takes issue with how psychiatric survivor narratives of resistance and resilience are coopted by systems of power that do not see such narratives as critiques but rather as “commodities to benefit organizational interests and solidify mental health truth regimes” (p. 9).

2. We do not include data from Ontario since we have explored the Ontario data in other work (Genest et al., 2021; Norman & Ricciardelli, 2021; Ricciardelli et al., 2020a).

3. We acknowledge that Correctional Officers working within their penal institutions are more represented in our findings than employees who work outside of the prison, such as Probation Officers. There are arguably many differences in how workplace conditions and cultures around mental health materialize for Probation Officers and those working within institutional walls and boundaries. Specifically, Probation Officers and other community corrections workers have more of a capacity to distance themselves from coworkers and the people they supervise, freedom to move about the community, and the ability to interact with a non-custodial population during their working hours. However, it was evident in our data that Correctional Officers do communicate and interact, at some point, with many outer-institutional employees, and thus their understandings of mental health are created somewhat in relation with one another. As a diverse network of employees, we maintain that all voices should be represented in the findings and any policies that arise from their experiences should be as inclusive as possible of the entire correctional worker population.