Following a string of suicides by Foxconn workers in China, three psychiatric specialists from the Taiwan Suicide Prevention Institute (TSPI) were invited to look into the causes of the deaths of the 12 individuals involved.
After three days of interviews the institute issued a statement saying that according to the information provided by Foxconn and its own interviews, three of the 12 were suspected of having some form of serious mental illness and eight were supposed to have emotional issues due to relationship problems, serious illness at home, parents splitting up or financial worries. The other was claimed to have been sleepwalking when he or she fell to their death. Consequently, the initial investigation appeared to rule out any connection between the 12 suicides and their actual work circumstances.
The Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries (TAVOJ) has extensive experience in counseling grassroots workers over occupational mental health issues faced in Taiwan and we find the above conclusions highly suspect.
The first question to ask is who invited those three TSPI psychiatrists to travel all the way to Foxconn’s Longhua plant? Which methodological framework did they employ? What was the background of the workers the company provided to assist in the investigation and of those who actually participated in the interviews? How were the interview questions structured? How were the responses analyzed?
These issues are instrumental to how occupational illness in this case is defined and need to be presented clearly and meticulously. This was clearly not what we saw in the statement. The conclusions were rushed and deliberately couched in technical jargon. This is not only a betrayal of the 12 Foxconn workers, it also makes us deeply suspicious of the motivation behind the investigation.
Second, serious mental illness and conspicuous emotional issues come about as the result of specific circumstances occurring in a person’s life, and these should have been the focus of the investigation. The statement given, however, concluded rather simply that they were the result of personal circumstances as outlined.
There have been numerous comments on the regimented management style at Foxconn and the high levels of stress within the factory, with employees expected to act like automatons, performing mundane, repetitive work for a minimum of 12 hours a day and being forbidden from engaging in conversation.
Given that these are obviously key stress-inducing factors and part of the common experience of workers in the factory, we find it strange that the psychiatrists failed to mention any structural factors in their findings, hastily concluding that the incidents had nothing to do with specific occupational or work-related factors.
Since 2007 we have been counseling a female quality control employee working in an electronics factory for an employer whose use of demotions, pay cuts and verbal abuse caused her to exhibit symptoms of depression. When she sought out medical recognition of her condition, the doctor officially evaluating the case claimed that her depression was due to a variety of factors and therefore could not be attributed to her work conditions as such.
The doctor went on to say that her symptoms were related to her inability to deal with the stress or benefit from the social support network around her, and could not therefore be blamed solely on the single factor of work.
This leads to a third point. Such a conservative interpretation of psychiatric illness caused by personal factors ignores work as an integral part of the entire social fabric.
Fourth, in the process of trying to get occupational psychiatric illnesses recognized as occupational diseases, TAVOJ has come across a number of psychiatrists unwilling to include these disorders as occupational diseases or even to recognize the existence of a causative relationship, given the fact that their etiology is complex and varied.
It is very unusual, then, as we have seen in the Foxconn case, for psychiatrists to take the extreme position of actively denying any conspicuous relationship between the reason for the suicides and the nature of the work performed.
After many years of campaigning by TAVOJ and victims of occupational hazards, the Council of Labor Affairs finally amended the law last year to allow workers suffering from mental illness as a result of conditions in the workplace to receive compensation, and for psychiatric disorders to be recognized as occupational diseases.
If someone is to be prevented from committing suicide it is of paramount importance to first discover the root cause of what is troubling them.
Given the high suicide rate in Taiwan, psychiatrists cannot afford to ignore the structural issues contributing to job-related pressures. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the psychiatrists responsible for the apparent whitewash in the Foxconn case, refuting out of hand any possible link between work and illness, are doing the entire profession a disservice and calling their integrity into question.
Huang Shiao-ling is secretary-general of the Taiwan Association for Victims of Occupational Injuries.
tRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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