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Mark Deuze, "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick" (Intellect Books, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Percy Jackson
My name is Percy Jackson.
- [00:02]
Pete Kunze
Getting in trouble is like breathing for me.
- [00:04]
Mark Deuze
The hit series returns to Disney and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine.
- [00:12]
Pete Kunze
For the key to our survival, three.
- [00:14]
Mark Deuze
Of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters.
- [00:17]
Pete Kunze
Let's go do the impossible. I'm not gonna let some stupid monsters stand in my way.
- [00:25]
Mark Deuze
Percy Jackson and the Olympians New season now on Disney and Hulu. Learn more@disneyplus.com whatson take the next 30.
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Percy Jackson
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- [01:27]
Pete Kunze
Specialoffer welcome to the New Books Network welcome to New Books in Media and Communication, a podcast series on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Pete Kunze. My guest today is Mark Duza, professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the author of well Being and Creative Careers. What makes you happy can also make you sick. The book was published by intellect Books in 2025. Good afternoon Mark. How are you doing today?
- [01:58]
Mark Deuze
Hey Pete. Good to be here? Yeah, pretty good. Recovering from a bit of a cold. Other than that, just happy and just got a fire going so we're all good. Thanks.
- [02:09]
Pete Kunze
Great, great. Well, it's wonderful to have you here and I'm really excited to talk about this project. I think it's super interesting and timely and useful. Before we dive in though, can you tell readers and listeners a bit about your background and training?
- [02:25]
Mark Deuze
Ah, well, I am Dutch. Grew up in the south of the Netherlands. Studied to become and then became a journalist. Worked for about seven years for a variety of newspapers as a freelance arts reporter, you know, interviewing my favorite bands because that's why I wanted to be a journalist. And some writers and some went to some plays and did some movie reviews, you know, the usual arts and culture kind of stuff. And then through a series of circumstances I found myself in South Africa, working as a journalist there for a South African newspaper and studying history and in the process combined it with media Mass Comm degree and again through a series of unplanned circumstances, found myself in a PhD program at the University of Amsterdam. I mean literally half year into the program, what I then understood to be supervisor walked into my office, said so where's your theoretical framework? And I said, theoretical what? I honestly didn't know what a PhD was. I mean I applied for, on a, on an ad in a newspaper that said University of Amsterdam is looking for somebody to interview journalists. I was like, I can do that. That sounds like fun. So yeah, that was a bit of a shock. And yeah, after finishing my PhD in Amsterdam, made my way over to the United States and got a Fulbright to spend a couple of years at USC in la and then spent eight years at Indiana University, Bloomington. A wonderful department, the telecomic. Now it's called the Media School of course. And yeah, and then since then I'm now back in Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam and Media Studies. I'm running a master's program in journalism, it's a professional program and doing most of my teaching in sort of media work and managing careers in the media and stuff like that. So pretty, pretty hands on actually and which I am enjoying tremendously. And yeah, so my training, academic training was first and foremost as an historian, so you know, oral histories, archive document analysis, that kind of stuff. And then during my PhD I did my PhD at what is now called as CORE, the Amsterdam School of Communication Research. So that was pretty full on social science methods, I mean, survey, statistical analysis, stuff like that. So yeah, I've got my leg in a bunch of different disciplines without choosing to do so.
- [05:24]
Pete Kunze
So how, how did this project come to be? How did your work in those areas lead you to, to this work now on, on well, being in more recent years?
- [05:34]
Mark Deuze
Well, about a year before the pandemic hit, I was involved at a project at the University of Amsterdam looking into really problematic, worrying statistics on student well being. There was just a colleague who was doing her PhD on student wellbeing using data from our medical services on campus showing that the vast majority of students were really struggling with feelings of social isolation, loss of motivation, substance abuse, you know, all kinds of. I mean, so the realization that, oh damn, I mean between 70 and 80% of the kids in my classes are not doing well, even though they chose to be here. Right. So they do what they want to do. I mean they Move to Amsterdam. They study. You know, we are very privileged that our program is ranked among the top in the world. So they're doing, you know, amazing stuff. They're an amazing environment. They're in a cohort of students from all over the world, super exciting. They're in Amsterdam, you know, what could possibly go wrong? Well, everything, as it turns out. And that was a bit of a shock. And at around the same time, there was actually a big strike of the faculty, protesting against working pressures, publish and perish and all that kind of stuff, and the contingent and precarious contracts. So clearly people were not doing well on every conceivable level at the university. And I was looking into this, figuring out, beyond appointing a small army of counselors, what's the root cause of all of this? Rather than treating the symptoms, let's find out what the cause is. And in talking with wellbeing experts at the time, I had this really actually quite uncomfortable realization. It's like, well, first of all, I am not well versed in the discourse around health and well being. Like, I use mental health willy nilly, but what do I know what that really means and how I would notice whether I'm doing okay or not? I mean, I might have a vague idea, but my mental health literacy is certainly not, you know, well developed. So that was one thing is like, ha, there's much more to this than I originally realized. And second, well, in my research from my dissertation onwards, I've always relied on interviews with media professionals for a lot of my data gathering. And so I've been interviewing media professionals across multiple disciplines and professions around the world for almost 25, 26 years. And by learning about well being and health as related to work or doing what you love, I all of a sudden had this aha moment, like, oh my God, all those interviews were always about well being. It's just I never made that connection, nor did my interviewees by that, by, for that matter. And to give you very clear, clear example, every interview I ever done with a media professional, I would always include the question, so how do you make it work? You know, it's being, of course, your career, your doing what you feel is important or interesting or valuable and making it work, it opens the conversation up. Beyond simply earning money, right? Making it work for a lot of people in creative careers is about much more than making money. It's also about telling stories that matter or doing work that is fulfilling or joyful or you know, or that is based on craft and expertise or whatever. So I wanted to keep that question open. And now all of a sudden I realize, well, asking people how do they make it work is also how they keep sane, how they keep healthy, how they keep, you know, how they survive in an industry that tends to be quite unforgiving. So that's when my perspective shifted and I started to look deliberately at the health and wellbeing literature. And then of course finding that besides a handful of projects involving war journalists, there was literally nothing. I mean, now I know there was something, but it was extremely hard to find actual academic research on the health and well being of people in, you know, media professions beyond within journalism, but also beyond journalism, in advertising, in film or in music or in games. I mean, there was just, there was a lot of literature on that working conditions aren't exactly great and that the industry is competitive and it's hard nosed and there can be quite a lot of toxic masculinity cultures in the workplace and, you know, stuff like that, precariousness. But the link with wellbeing was never made or just hinted at. You know, people are stressed. And so that was sort of a moment where I felt like, yeah, there's a real gap in my knowledge, a gap in our literature, and also a gap in the stories we can tell to our students. Because let's be honest, if you teach anywhere in the world in a journalism, media, mass comm related program, 99% of your students want to work in the media. But what story do we tell them about? What that work is actually like? About what it takes to make it work.
- [11:17]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. As I was reading your book, I couldn't help but think this is true for anyone in higher ed, like so much of the. And you make that connection as well. But, you know, I think there's a tendency, especially among media industry scholars to kind of treat the media industry as at a distance. And the more I was reading this, the more I'm like, you know, we're, we're both driven by passion. We're both working in, you know, structural conditions that are increasingly precarious. And we do it because we love it and yet it's making us unwell. Right.
- [11:47]
Mark Deuze
Yeah.
- [11:48]
Pete Kunze
And so it really resonated there. I'm hoping you could talk a bit more about this, this, this gap you're noticing in the labor literature. Right. Because I think in some ways, and maybe this is just as someone working in the US in media industry studies, it seems like so much of the field right now is about labor. Right. And yet it seems like we're missing the quotidian aspects of it. Right. The affective aspects. And can you talk about how noticing that lacuna kind of challenged you to rethink your own research approach and how you got into that kind of question. And I think one of the things that's really interesting is like, it's very important. But then I can sense in your previous comment this kind of anxiety in talking about mental health because it is so delicate, it's so private, it's so nebulous for those of us who don't work in that space. Right. And yet it's so integral to what we're doing. Right. And that tension, I think is fascinating between we're not talking about this because of its sensitivity, because of the lack of training we have to understand it. And yet at the same time, it's shaping so much of this, this issue that we are passionate about and not only in our research, but in our classrooms.
- [13:06]
Mark Deuze
Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, I mean, let's just mean noticing that in my own work, as in the work of so many of our colleagues in media MassCom research, that even though we do talk about labor, we don't talk about health as related to work, isn't sort of, you know, because we're willingly ignoring it or because we don't care or because we don't find it interesting. It's just we don't have access to that toolkit, that academic toolkit, the disciplinary jargon and discourse, the nuanced, you know, carefully an evidence based way of talking about these kind of concepts. So, and that's, I mean, most people in our field aren't trained as psychologists, and especially not psychologists in fields of labor, occupational medicine and those kind of specialized fields. So that's one another thing I do feel, and again, mea culpa this is also part of my work is that look, production studies in media studies is relatively young. It's like two decades old as a field. I mean, David Hesbinhardt's work is sort of seminal here, but he, I mean, beyond a couple of newsroom studies in the 70s and 80s, I mean, there were, and I mean, there's a rare ethnography of an advertising agency in the 90s or a Japanese game studio in the early 2000s. But other than that, there really wasn't much to go on when it came to production studies that only started in the early 21st century. And so that's another reason why we haven't really significantly touched upon this. And there's also another argument to be made is that, and that also explains the relative youth of production studies is. I don't know if that's an American expression. Even though I lived in the US for 10 years, I can't remember whether it is. It's like, do we really want to know how the sausage gets made? Because the moment you know, you don't want to eat it, right? And I mean in the book I'm using a story of an American farmer and chef who makes this argument and he actually himself makes the reference to the entertainment industry. It's like he makes the argument if you eat your food and you don't know where the food on your plate came from, you're missing out on a significant aspect of the quality of the food and the enjoyment of the food. So this was an argument, you know, farm to table kind of authenticity, you know, try to eat food that is local, that hasn't traveled thousands of miles to get to your plate and don't eat processed foods. That kind of argument. And you can make that argument about media as well. Do we really want to know how the Harry Potter movies were made? How many suicides there were during the process? Do we really want to know how underpaid people are that and how overworked they are? That made the game that we've just been doing all nighters on for the last two weeks with our friends? Maybe we actually don't really want to know. And I think let's just acknowledge that that's another reason. I mean, there's more to this obviously. But I'll give you a very quick anecdote that to me, a lot of the hesitancy about knowing this also up is like yesterday I was very kindly invited to give a talk about my book at a Dutch university. Not on my own, but another one. And I dutifully presented my findings and the first student, the first question I got from a student is a question I often get, especially from students, never from industry professionals, but always from students is, yeah, but aren't people that want to creative career, aren't they, you know, a bit more likely to be psychologically troubled than other people? And I mean, just the, I mean, I get it, the question, but it's interesting, right? It's like first of all she doesn't realize it, but she's referencing herself. Like every student in that classroom wants to work in the media. So what you're saying is you're all troubled by definition. And secondly, there is actually a well established literature on the link between creativity and psychopathology. And when it comes to Working artists. That link is tenuous at best. Right? I mean, if you want to have an established professional career in the arts or in the creative industries or in the media, you won't survive if you're not mentally stable in some way or at least able to cope with what the industry throws at you. So, so, yeah, so there's lots of different reasons that make this field, make this angle to this kind of work a bit, a bit more difficult or complex to navigate, for sure. But, but I mean, and I'll also say that after doing that research for a couple of years, I, I got stuck because I realized, I mean, I can document, I can map the issues in the industry because the industry does that to itself. Right? All my data in the book comes from the industry, not from me. I mean, the industry has been really well established in, in, in conducting research and surveys for the last 10 years all over the world about how its professionals are doing and how they're feeling. So they know this is not a secret. It's just that how do we integrate that aspect of media work production into a model that explains how the industry works? And that's where I got stuck. I felt like my training as a historian or as a MassCom scholar does not help me here at all. I mean, the sociology of work is all good and well, but it doesn't help me with explaining this. And this is where my friendship with colleagues at the University Medical center here in Amsterdam really provided the breakthrough. They gave me sort of the training and the discourse and the literature to sort of. I remember when I first sort of shared what I was doing with a friend of mine in occupational medicine and she wrote back, yeah, she was very kind. She said, like, huh, this is really not the way we would get away with publishing anything about this in my fields. And secondly, maybe you can read some of this and then attaching like 25 PDF files. So, yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why this book took six years to write is that I had to do four years of studying.
- [20:10]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. Can we talk a bit more? I'm struck by this parallel you draw between, you know, I think I've read before what the student was referring to, something like the Sylvia Plath effect or something, right? That certain creatives are more prone to mental illness. But what you're talking about, understandably, is that, you know, that makes the problem an individual problem, but it's a structural problem. Right? So I'd like you to tell us a little bit more about what is it about media Work in particular, and of course not exclusive to media work. Other professions have this issue, but what about media work do you see as particularly creating this issue of passion versus sickness or that tension at least? Like, Right, yeah. Why is media work in particular creating these kind of deleterious conditions?
- [21:12]
Mark Deuze
Well, I think the answer there lies in two, for me, fundamental insights. And the first one is something that I think most of us kind of get intuitively, which is summarized in the subtitle of the book, what makes you happy can also make you sick. Meaning that the unique thing about professionals across all the media industries, whether it's journalists, filmmakers, game developers, musicians, whatever, is that in all the research that documents how they're doing, they're just as likely to say, I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this. I'm so grateful, I'm so happy. If I had a choice, I would do this all over again. This is the best job ever. This is my dream job. This is my passion project, and so on and so forth. They're just as likely to express themselves in those terms. The majority tends to do that as well as the majority saying, this work negatively impacts my health and well being, or this is not a mentally healthy place of work. When they talk about our industry or when they're asked to use a word to describe their industry, they would inevitably use a negative word like struggling or chaos. So you have this weird tension between passion and problems or pain, right? And that is tempting to stay with that paradox and say, well, they're doing it to themselves, right? If 75% of journalists say this is the best thing ever, and 75% say like, well, the work is not very good for my health and well being, then, well, dude, you're digging your own grave. Right? Deal with it. And now that's a wildly unsatisfying analysis. And it's also what is interesting about the debt analysis is that it's a kind of a trope within the industry. Like if you can't send the heat, say, out of the kitchen, kind of bullshit. It's, sorry for my language, but it's like, you know, I don't know about you, but when our journalism students go on internships, inevitably one or two or more come back with stories. Like when they would express to an editor like, oh, today was a bit of a tough day. And then an editor would say, would bark at them, well, then you're not cut out for this. Rather than actually like, hey, you want to talk about it? What's going on? What's difficult about it. This is how we deal with that. The user resource. No, no, no, no. They're getting barked at. And, and it's because, of course, we don't actually want to deal with what's going on. And we all know what's going on, but we can't name it because we're all passionate about it as well. Right. So that is not good enough. So that's the one part of the answer to your question. The second part is, was, oh, okay, Working, pursuing a creative career, turning your creativity into work, into a career comes with its own unique sort of paradox of being really passionate and also struggling along the way of making it in a really tough and unforgiving industry. But then why are so many people really suffering and struggling? Why is the biggest problem in all the creative industries the churn? Right, the fact that people who enter the industry, the new voices, new talent, people with diverse backgrounds, all leave within a couple of years, if not sooner. Whether that's Hollywood, whether that's newsrooms, whether that's, you know, game studios, whether that's, you know, all of them report that turnover rates are the number one issue in all creative industries, which explains also the diversity problem that the media industry has as a whole. So what is it about? Apparently passion is not enough and it's also not an explanation for making it work. There's something else at work, and this is where the work of the colleagues in occupational medicine really helped me. And that sort of explained to me, what is it about the media industry that makes it so particular to your original question, which is that in occupational medicine there's a model that has been sort of developed over time that summarizes the aspects of work that predictably make people sick. Right. So in other words, it's a predictive model for work related stress that not just make people feel, you know, burned out now and then or have maybe needing a week off. No, no, no. Getting a medical diagnosis like, hey, you can't work anymore, like go home. And the model that they've developed has an explained variance of between 60 to 80%, which is huge. So it's a very powerful model. Now obviously, in occupational medicine, that model describes aspects of work that are the exception, that are extreme outliers. And when they occur, and they occur structurally, you can predict that things sooner or later will go wrong for the workers involved. Now the thing with that model is that model describes the way almost every single media company that I've ever known, that I've ever read about, that I've ever Studied is run, in other words, the outliers. The extremes in other economic sectors are at the heart of how media get managed. And that in turn predicts that so many people fall by the wayside, quit, run up into a brick wall, don't make it work. I mean, and all those kind of things now. And the key elements of this model are a lack of reciprocity between what people bring to the work and what they get back from it, which can relate to material aspects like, you know, fair pay, decent working conditions, good contracts, you know, healthcare provisions, stuff like that, maternity leave, you know, just basic occupational elements. But it can also be effective, like being told whether you've done a job well or getting recognized for the hard work that you put in, even if the project perhaps failed, or some kind of social support structure within the industry. The second element is organizational justice, or better yet, the lack thereof. I mean, if you work at a place where decisions aren't being made about your work or the work of your colleagues, without any kind of transparency, without any kind of clear protocols or guidelines, without accountability systems, well, then sooner or later you're going to burn out. I mean, like, especially if those decisions feel unfair, unjust, nepotistic even. And then the third element in that model, between lack of reciprocity and organizational injustice, if the workload at work is consistently high, but it's matched with little or no status, control or autonomy over the work that you do, people tend to burn out pretty quickly, right? So you work harder and harder all the time, which in and of itself isn't a problem. In fact, for many, it's a reason to work in the media to begin with. You know, pushing against the deadline, getting the story out, you know, getting a. The reports were on air. I mean, how cool is that? That is the most awesome thing. Afterwards, you go to a bar, have a great night. It's awesome, you know, a wrap party at the end of a movie, getting a game to go gold. I mean, it's really exciting. But if the work that you do under this intense pressure is work that you have to do that you're being told to do in a specific, specific way that doesn't necessarily utilize your talents or creativity that you're not supposed to play around or experiment or fail at, well, I mean, that kind of lack of control or autonomy can be killing, especially for people who are creatively inclined in their work. So the combination of lack of reciprocity, organizational injustice, and this link between work, intense workload and low autonomy, well, the thing is that pretty much defines the media industry. That's kind of the system. So the problem of the system isn't a couple of, you know, nasty old white guys, although there's plenty of them. The problem isn't, you know, a shitty manager, although there's plenty of those too. I mean, the problem is that everybody works within a system that predictively makes people sick. Which also begs the point, well, what does that say of people who manage to work in this system, who managed to build successful careers? Are they the best storytellers, the most talented and hardworking journalists? Sure, many of them probably are. But I would say many as well are simply able to cope with a sickening system. And to prove this point, what really is something that I picked up from doing this research that regrettably I didn't pick up well enough before was that the media and entertainment industry is among the economic sectors in any society that keeps a record of this, that scores the highest on indicators related to discrimination, workplace harassment, bullying, aggression, abuse, especially as directed to women, to newcomers, to people with diverse backgrounds, DQ people, and so on and so forth. And the reason why that's so mind boggling is that I don't know about you, Pete, but. But almost every single journalist or filmmaker or actor or game dev or musician that I have ever talked to, and including my own students, they're among the most well educated, progressively thinking, cosmopolitan. You know, they're all very much in favor of anything related to DUI, eToday, equity and inclusion mean.
- [31:33]
Percy Jackson
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- [32:32]
Mark Deuze
So what turns all these people all of a sudden into the most disgusting bullies at work. Well, obviously, because the work is unhealthy, right? Sure. There are a couple of horrific sexists and racists and narcissists in the media industry. I'm sure, like, there are everywhere, including in academe. But there's something about that work that makes it really, really hard to regulate your emotions, to feel safe while doing the work, to feel supported and seen. And people do crazy things when there's nowhere to go, with their intense feelings about all of their frustrations, their anger, the pressure that they feel they're under, all the frigging time. And that makes people lash out and do really, really horrible things to each other. So that's, in a nutshell, a part of the argument that I'm making. It's like, you know, look at the level of. I mean, it's no surprise that Black Lives Matter and Me too, found their fastest pickup in the media industry. And I mean that in and of itself. So, yeah, we should pay attention to that. But I think what is underneath this is a mentally unhealthy way of working.
- [33:45]
Pete Kunze
Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating to consider how, on the one hand, you know, so many of these careers tend to be collaborative in nature. Right. If you're going to work on a film set, if you're going to work in a newsroom, and yet, because of precarity, because of neoliberal capitalism, surveillance capitalism, right. We know there's an atomizing that goes on. There's an maybe an enemy, there's an antisociality that emerges in this kind of competition, Right. Where these folks are pitted against each other. And you also talk quite a bit about kind of even thinking about, I'm in New Orleans, which is a smaller media capital, but we often have students who want to work in the industry, but they know they're going to go from gig to gig, or they have to maintain access to the city until then. And the city can be pricey in the meantime. Right. So that kind of, you know, and we see this particularly with our students going to New York and la. They have to live in these cities, and, you know, they're living paycheck to paycheck.
- [34:48]
Mark Deuze
Right.
- [34:50]
Pete Kunze
Early on in the book, you know, you kind of make an important point about how, you know, we need to talk about this, but we also need to do it in a way that's theoretically rigorous. And you're in conversation in part with David Hesmanhautch, who in his own work has called for a more rigorous approach to exploitation. How do we navigate that.
- [35:13]
Mark Deuze
Right.
- [35:13]
Pete Kunze
Because on the one hand, there's this desire maybe to be kind of withdrawn, objective, like this person is being exploited. But then on the other hand, people may not realize they're being exploited or conversely, people feel they're being exploited. But it's the tough nature of the work going back to the. The harsh newsroom manager who's kind of brushing off the journalist who's complaining about a tough day. So how do you make exploitation not only theoretically rigorous, but usable, practical for this kind of important work?
- [35:49]
Mark Deuze
Well, I mean, there's a couple of ways. One is the sensitivity that we have to have, and that's what the power and the beauty of David's work, of David Hampton's work comes in, is to hold space for the fact that the people that you're observing or interviewing about all of this can be really happy and grateful and miserable at the same time. Right. It's not either or secondly, that that is also the nature of health and well being, that it's not a, it's never a constant. It's up and down and all over the place depending on all kinds of factors and contexts. And you need to hold space for that too, academically, theoretically. So I think that's a sort of a two pronged approach to sensitize yourself towards talking about this with great nuance and forgiveness. And thirdly, to appreciate, and this is a point I made earlier as well about myself, is that people's emotional literacy tend to be frighteningly low. I mean, unless you've been to therapy, most of us don't really understand the patent ways in which we as bodies make sense of the world around us and the defenses we put into place to handle the intense pressures and emotional labor that we all have to do in creative careers. So you can ask somebody about their health issues, but if they've never deliberately thought about it or not thought about it in relation to the work that they also love, then what data do you get from that? Do you hope to get from that? Right. So you have to be very careful in the kind of questions you ask and what you're pointing out. And that's, you know, the model I just highlighted from the colleagues in occupational medicine really helps because instead asking people, so do you ever get exploited or do you feel that the industry is exploitative, which is pointless to ask? You can say, well, can you give an example of where you gave your gave everything you've got to a specific project or a gig or a job and you still lost the client, lost the gig or lost your job and how did you deal with that? Or have you seen that happening to your peers and how did they deal with that? And what are the different ways in which you make sense of that or talk about that? That's a way of talking about this that is theoretically rigorous and nuanced and that in a composite way allows you to paint a picture of how people are actually doing. And that's what I've tried to do in the book where I combining on the one hand hundreds and hundreds of reports that the industry, professional associations, unions, charities, all kinds of collectives have produced over the last 10 years or so around the world on, you know, the health and well being of professionals in their particular industry, with interviews with associations, directly involved in offering support and services to media professionals. With revisiting my old data myself, it's like rereading my old transcripts and revisiting my own publications like huh. In lots of different ways. I was already talking about health and wellbeing without talking about health and well being. And I think together with some of the more key literatures in psychology and psychiatry, at least for me, have helped me sort of making sense of this and feel also empowered to answer tough questions because I am getting tough questions about this work, and rightfully so, but a lot of the questions are, and I say this respectfully because I was utterly and completely oblivious about this to begin with, a showcase that, you know, those who pursue careers in the media or those who teach about media and mass comm aren't necessarily trained in talking about this particular aspect of the work. And look, I mean, I've referenced occupational medicine a couple of times now. Well, let's be clear, the field of occupational medicine, which is specialized in theorizing and predicting how work related stressors can lead to psychosocial problems. Well, the psychosocial part of it is relatively new in that field too. Up until the late 20th century, most of that work was about wearing hard hats at the construction sites and Kevlar for Marines. Right. Occupational medicine was about physical health. The psychosocial aspect is actually relatively new for everybody in the field. So that's another acknowledgement I think that we need to make here.
- [40:50]
Pete Kunze
Yeah, there's a tension in what you're saying that I'm hoping we can talk more about, which is on the one hand you're finding rapport after report after report after report that says this is a problem. And yet on the other hand, there's it doesn't seem to be a conversation among the workers themselves or you Know, like it seems that you're getting this, you're getting this from these surveys. You're getting it maybe from your interviews.
- [41:16]
Mark Deuze
Right.
- [41:17]
Pete Kunze
But can you, can you talk more about, you know, is there, is there some kind of like, you know, I don't know, like Foucaultian policing going on where no one wants to talk about it because you don't want to be seen as the person who's, who can't handle it or is it, is it. You mentioned, I believe the term was emotional illiteracy. Right. So like people, you know, when asked about it, they can speak to, you know, this evidence of anxiety or this evidence of depression, but, you know, they're not thinking of themselves necessarily as someone who is suffering. So I'm curious to hear about this, like what the data is showing and what, and your interview data as well, in addition to these kind of major large scale reports. But also maybe this kind of ineptitude, inability to articulate this or this kind of culture of silence that you're seeing among creatives. Is that an accurate assessment of what you saw or do you think that I'm overestimating how little is being said by the creatives to other creatives?
- [42:18]
Mark Deuze
Well, I do want to acknowledge that because all my data comes from the industry itself and comes from reports that the industry is documenting about itself. That this notion of let's, of making this conversation difficult or the taboo and stigma associated with having a conversation about health as related to work is beginning to change quite dramatically, I would say. The book came out in September and I've been giving talks about the book ever since, almost every other day. And the vast, vast majority of those talks are at industry gatherings at the invitation of people in the industry. This week alone, I was in Prague at a gathering of Central and Eastern European game studios, in Paris for a meeting of the European film industry and in the Netherlands at a meeting of all the journalism schools and the National Union of Journalists. So, and they were all wanted to talk about, you know, how do we create a healthier culture of work. So, and publicly, and not just among, you know, the food soldiers, but There were also CEOs of massive companies and corporations there. So. No, I mean, it is beginning to. The needle is beginning to shift and I think my book is just part of documenting that. However, it is true that there are quite a lot of places where this is not talked about or when it's talked about, it's met with a lot of stigma and taboo, so and stigmatizing and tabooing conversations about health and wellbeing, first and foremost has to do with feeling uncomfortable and not knowing how to talk about this. So, yes, that's a matter of mental health literacy. And the literature on mental health literacy clearly indicates that this is frightfully low across the board for almost everybody. So let's just acknowledge that. That most of us aren't very good at talking about how we feel, especially in relation to work. On top of that, how difficult it is in relation to work that we love. There is this really amazing documentary that was made a couple of years ago by an Australian filmmaker called Ben Steele, who went on to found an organization called screenwell, which invests in mentally healthy ways of working in the Australian screen industry. And Ben, who was a very successful child actor in Australia, moved to Hollywood, you know, successful career, had a burnout, and then documented his own process of working through this burnout. And in the documentary, it's called the Show Must Go On. It's available on Vimeo and online. There's an interview with Sam Neill, and we all know Sam Neill from his work in Jurassic park and so many other movies. The new series Untamed that just came out now, he's playing the lead role together with Eric Bane. And Sam has been very upfront about his own struggles with mental health as related to the work. And in the interview, he makes his point. He said, like, the problem was, and I'm paraphrasing, is that I always said, I am an actor. In other words, this thing that I do is who I am. And he said, what I learned that helped me coping with the darkness I was facing in the months or years that I wasn't acting, that I wasn't getting new scripts, that I wasn't being called by my agent was to say, I am working as an actor, right? This is not who I am. This is what I do. And I think that, in a nutshell, really speaks to this. It's really hard to be critical of something or to identify problems with something that you are that is at the heart, at the core of how you define and identify with yourself. I mean, how can you step outside of yourself and say, hey, that thing that I love, it's making me sick now, that's all. I mean, without years and years of speed talk therapy, I don't think most of us can even begin to approach this, right? And so I think that just needs to be acknowledged as well. It's like, yeah, this is bloody hard. And the people who do speak out, and of course, then it becomes understandable that when people speak out, it's out of access. So the first studies in this area were done about two groups of people, rock and pop musicians that died very young, right? The Jimi Hendrixes, the Janis Joplins, the Ian Curtises, the Chris Cornells, the Amy Whitehouses of our world and studies of war and conflict reporters. So people are really pushed to the extreme, right? And like the first. I mean, one of the reasons why this topic of mental health is now becoming destigmatized has to do again, with extremes, with me too, with cases related to me too, with the Harvey Weinsteins of this world. And it's almost like we needed those extremes to shine a light on something that actually affects all of us. Right? The research clearly shows that pretty much every single journalist encounters traumatizing events, images, stories and conversations on an almost daily basis in their work. Now, trauma, informed reporting is a term that only came up a year ago, right? As something we can talk about and then let alone something we teach or perhaps should teach. Yet every single journalist covers trauma all the freaking time. It's a definition of news, right? If it bleeds, it leads. Think about how disgusting that line is when you look at it in the context of mental health. So we're expecting people to cover people that are literally bleeding and not be, you know, we're objective, we're machines. And then we're surprised that all our work gets outsourced to AI. Yeah, of course it will. AI doesn't go home traumatized from covering a school shooting, but a journalist will. So, yeah, there's a real complicating factor in expecting people to thoroughly and safely reflect on the potentially problematic aspects of their work when they are their work. And I think that's something we can easily address also in education and in the stories we tell about all of this is, hey, yes, it's amazing and it's wonderful and it's fulfilling and it's fun and it's exciting, but it's just a job. That's all it is. And it's a job for an industry that doesn't care about you. The industry doesn't. There's people in the industry, lots of them, that really, really care, absolutely. Care about their peers, care about their teams, care about their colleagues. Beautiful, lovely. But the industry doesn't care. It really doesn't. I mean, all the stories that are happening now, you know, the big takeovers emerges and acquisitions in games, all the major game publishers have been bought out the last year and almost all game developers have lost their jobs. In the process, the same is happening in Hollywood. Right. Third of the workforce in Hollywood has lost their jobs in the last 12 months. The same happened in the UK. I mean, advertising agencies are merging and firing people and closing down entire agencies left and right. Omnicom is doing that all over the world, largely because of AI. And all these stories are covered in the news, but nobody talks about what happens to human beings because of these takeovers. None of these takeovers are informed by caring for creators or creatives. None of them. The industry really doesn't care about you. And I think that's so important. Doesn't mean that the work is awful or that being a journalist is a nightmare. No, it's the most important, the most beautiful job there is. But don't make a mistake to think that the industry cares about you. It really doesn't. It's not designed that way. The system of the industry, if anything, is designed to make people sick and not by some evil schemers and dangerous old white guys. It's just. I mean, there's amazing work like Frank Fedler, an American colleague who did a study of autobiographies and reports of American journalists in the 1800s, and he found stories about militaristic working cultures and competitiveness and stress and people, you know, feeling really intimidated by having to work in these environments. I mean, there's this beautiful book in the Dream Factory by an anthropologist who ended up in Hollywood in 1950 and looked around and said, what the hell are these people doing? They're weird. This obviously is not a healthy industry, but they're all acting like it's femme fantastic all the time. And so none of what I describe in a book is new. This has always been there. When I talk to industry professionals, they all nod and say, like, yep, that sums up about my career. And honestly, sorry that I'm going on this long feedback, but I've told you earlier that most of my presentations about the book are at industry gatherings, and almost every single time. And I'm really not exaggerating here, after I give a talk, there's a couple of people that come up and they say, hey, Mark, I just want to give you a hug. And not because I was so fantastic or whatever, but simply as I say, yeah, you just described my experience in the last five, 10, 20, 30, whatever years. I just never saw it like that. And that, I mean, that's both shocking and, of course, also fulfilling as an academic, because, you know, what if I was wrong? But I clearly am not, and then the next step is okay, so what are we going to do about this? Right, yeah.
- [52:56]
Pete Kunze
Well, that sets me up for my next question because I fear as. As we would say stateside, that we're bumming people out. So. But you also make it very clear early in your book that, you know, quote, this is as much a record of ailments as it is a chronicle of transformation and radical hope. Yeah. So bring us back from the precipice, mark.
- [53:21]
Mark Deuze
Right.
- [53:21]
Pete Kunze
What, what role might joy and pain play? Not pain, sorry, Freudian slit there. Love and joy no play in moving forward, especially for those of us who prepare future professionals. Right. Because most of us are in departments, regardless of the critical nature of our work, most of us are in departments that are professionalizing. Right, Absolutely. Yeah.
- [53:46]
Mark Deuze
Well, yeah, so that's. Thanks for setting me up for that because I do find the book to be optimistic and, and for a couple of reasons. Number one, I didn't come up with this analysis or this data. The industry does. So, you know, and as any doctor or therapist will tell you, acknowledging you have a problem is halfway through solving it. Right. So the industry knows it has a problem and is documenting it and is coming out with it all. Every single trade magazine in games or in film or in news has covered stories on this, whether it's the Columbia Journalism Review or Poynter or the Pew Research center or any of those professional publications has covered the mental health crisis in American newsrooms or in newsrooms anywhere. So this is not a secret. And it isn't a secret because the industry itself is documenting this. So that's, number one, to me, a source of great optimism. It's like, ha. We're dealing with people who understand and appreciate that they have a problem, whether they actually care or whether they just care about losing all this talent and all that kind of stuff, whatever, they're both equally valid arguments, at least they acknowledge, like, yeah, we can't keep doing the way this, the way we've done this in the past. Secondly, I'm optimistic because of, in the, of the book, I document what I found around the world in terms of initiatives of dealing with this. And yes, most of these initiatives are still at the level of the individual. Right. Making media professionals more resilient. And while that's wonderful, you know, teaching self care and those kind of things, it of course doesn't change anything about the way things work. But it's a step and it's well intended and well meant. But there are sectoral changes as well. I mean, the number of organizations active in the field of health and well being for media professionals is truly astounding. I mean, hundreds around the world and they're all doing incredible work, often pro bono, non profits, charity based. Some are dedicated therapists, specifically working with journalists or with musicians or with film people. Some are, you know, providing all kinds of resources. Some are unions, some are other kinds of professional. I mean, there's so much going on. I mean, one of the reasons why I've been putting the interviews I've been doing with all these organizations online, on YouTube and on my subject head channel is because I want these fields to talk to each other. Right? Because journalists and people active in journalism often think, well, all these problems are unique to journalism and in advertising they think, well, the advertising industry is really special. We have unique challenges. And in film they say, well, yeah, but you can't compare this to film because on film, on a set, well, oh, you know, what's going on there? Or in game studios, well, you know, we have crunch and nobody else does. And well, they're all wrong. The data doesn't lie. The data is consistent across these professions. Yes, of course, the work of a journalist is very different than the work of a game developer or a pop star. But the relation they have to the work, right, that paradox between being passionate and also feeling, yeah, this is an unhealthy industry. The elements of reciprocity and injustice and the low autonomy play out across these industries. And the essence of people's motivation to work in these industries is the same too. Right? People want to tell stories and be left alone while doing so. That's what a journalist wants as much as an advertising creative or a musician. Now, you mentioned love in your question and we started our conversation with acknowledging that while there is a really rich emerging literature on production studies, that most of that literature doesn't really address health and well being explicitly or directly. It doesn't mean that the literature doesn't tackle with things like precariousness and exploitation. It certainly does, but it tends to then either assume or even make explicit that the passion of the professionals in these industries is their problem. That the fact that they're so passionate they must be willing to accept these exploitative circumstances because how else are we going to make sense of this? And I've learned in my project that that's actually not just a little bit wrong, it's woefully wrong. The problem with the passion is that the passion gets misdirected. The industry tempts media professionals to direct their passion into the end product, the story, the Reports the game, the film, the documentary, the narrative, the song. Right. And so you put all your heart and soul to make sure that the logo is perfect or that the trailer that you're working on is great, or that the most important news is covered in the first paragraph of your written story or whatever you're doing. The problem, however, is with all that investment is that that doesn't really benefit anyone. It may be just the industry, but not, certainly not you. What if we redirect that passion towards the changing the industry? And that's in fact what my book documents. Yes, it maps out all the different challenges and problems across all these industries. But I get to do that because of the passion of so many people across all the industries to document this and to try to change something. And the reason why this is so significant is that love is not just a feeling, you know, something, you know, between lovers or something like that. Love is a transformative force. Right. People do things out of love that they normally would never ever do. And it doesn't mean they're blindly accepting exploitation because nobody in Hollywood does. Everybody knows what's wrong with the industry. It's just like how they haven't found a way to redirect that love in towards changing the industry, but it's really not that hard to do so. But you need a structured way of talking about this. You may normalize the conversation and strip it from stigma and taboo. And you need help and you need to realize that you're not crazy for struggling or for sometimes finding that that thing that you're so passionate about is also slowly but surely killing you. And that's actually, it's almost weird if you don't feel that way. Right. So I'm just genuinely hopeful that work such as I've done and other colleagues have done, Sally Ann Gross and George Musgrave for the music industry, or Hannah Storm and Maya Samanyak for the journalism industry. And many other authors are now coming out with their work as special issues in academic journals like Journalism Educator recently and Digital Journalism on, well, being in journalists. I mean, that work like that helps us and helps the field to realize, ha, we're not alone in this. We're not crazy for sometimes really struggling. And the ways of doing things differently are actually not rocket science. You can handle, you know, reducing the lack of reciprocity. You can make organizational procedures and decision making processes more transparent and more accountable. You can make sure that people, when they work really hard, get proper time off, paid time off. I mean, to close off with an Anecdote that made me laugh. And I had versions of this anecdote several times at industry gatherings. I mean, I was doing a session on this topic at the Dutch National Film Festival. And at the end, a guy in the back of the room just shouted, just exasperated. Mark, are you trying to say that I have to talk with all the crew members individually? And I was like, well, that would be a start. Just checking in with people like, how are you doing? And one producer told me, well, that's kind of what I do. I don't have extra money lying around, but what I can do is at the beginning of a shoot, just do an individualized check in. What do people need to do their best possible work and how can I help? Or in a newsroom of a major TV talk show, I was doing this presentation and one of the editors afterwards said, okay, okay, I kind of get it, so what can I do tomorrow, right, with all of this? And again, I was like asking people how they're doing care. I mean, in a lot of research in these surveys among media professionals, when they are asked, so what needs to change? You know, when they are asked what needs to change, the number one thing across all the research is leadership. And not like different leaders, but leaders that are more empathic leaders that actually seem to care. Now, I will say that's a double edged sword because there isn't much leadership leadership research in the media. But that the what the kind of work that is available shows a rather unique conundrum that a lot of leaders face. Like when you become a manager or a leader or an editor in chief or something like that, and let's say you kind of know about all of this and you want to make a difference, right? You want to start caring for your team and for your newsroom and you want to treat people well and you want to, you know, I wouldn't say give everybody a good hug, but you know, you're, you're empathic, you're, you're a good person. A lot of managers in research report back and saying when they try to do that, they fail. Why? Well, first of all, because they don't know how to do it because nobody ever trained them or properly professionally prepared them to do stuff like that. But secondly is that the road that got them to the top didn't require them to be nice and to care and to be empathic. So now they are manager, they're a leader, and all of a sudden they like, hey, how you doing? I'm here for you. My door is always open and people go like, why should we believe you? Because the last 20 years you were this super hard nosed investigative reporter, always out all nighters trying to get the story and now all of a sudden like, hey, it's totally okay if you go clock out at 5, go see your family, go pick up your kid from school. I love you. That's not exactly very credible. So it's really hard. I mean, I don't want to make this sound like replace the leaders because it's not that simple. Nothing is simple.
- [64:59]
Pete Kunze
No, but I also think that's probably a good place for us to wrap up. Right. Because it's starting a conversation rather than ending one. And I really appreciate the issues you're raising here for us today, Mark, and thank you so much for your time. It's really been a pleasure to talk with you.
- [65:14]
Mark Deuze
Same here. Thanks, Bean. Really appreciate it.
- [65:17]
Pete Kunze
My pleasure. The book is well, being in creative what makes you happy can also make you sick. Available now from Intellect Books and other online booksellers. This is Pete Kunze and this has been new books and media on the New Books Network. Thank you for listening and we hope you'll join us again next time.
- [65:49]
Mark Deuze
And Doug, here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people.
- [65:54]
Pete Kunze
Customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars.
- [66:06]
Mark Deuze
Dealers watching us. Cut the camera.
- [66:08]
Pete Kunze
They see us.
- [66:08]
Mark Deuze
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com savings. Very unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.