This paper asks how identity is constructed for individuals with mental health conditions (hereafter abbreviated as MHCs) in the workplace. It takes especial regard to how MHCs are discursively situated, constructed and reconstructed in the workplace. Employees with MHCs face a difficult situation: not only do they need to deal with the stigma and discrimination commonly associated with MHCs, they must also manage their health condition whilst adhering to organisational demands to demonstrate performance and commitment to work. Discourse analysis derived from 32 interviews with individuals with MHCs delineates how these individuals feel both stigmatised and empowered by their MHCs. The findings address three discursive strands: (1) Reaffirmation of the social stigma and a pejorative construction of a mental health subject position in employment and society; (2) Contesting 'mental illness' as a less productive form of subjectivity by embracing mental health management skills within the employment context; and (3) Recounting mental health as a disempowered subjectivity through public disclosure and change. This paper enhances understanding of how the construction of positive identity in the face of negative attributions associated with MHCs contributes to literature on identity, organisations and stigma as well as raising implications for policy and practice.

This article examines the internal and external pressures to ‘normalize’ identity in relation to individuals experiencing mental health conditions (MHCs) at work. The data takes the form of three vignettes extracted from a larger empirical study of 60 interviews. These explore the tensions surrounding identity for individuals experiencing MHCs as well as their interventions to suppress exhibiting the condition. The analysis captures a number of competing meanings surrounding identity in relation to learning to care for the self and managing MHCs. Our contribution is to explore the relationships between learning to care for the self and the performativity of ‘normalizing’ identity in managing MHCs at work. It also provides a potential means of integrating Foucault’s ethics of caring for the self with the literature on identity in ways that can be illuminating for those who manage their MHCs and the demands of work through processes of ‘normalization’. This analysis offers theoretical insights regarding how identity work may be self-defeating in exacerbating MHCs and therefore is of some practical benefit for managers, health professionals and those experiencing MHCs since they often leave individuals with little choice but to intensify their attempts to ‘normalize’ their identities.

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The worldwide spread of work-related mental unhealth suggests that this is a major problem affecting organizations and employees on a global scale. In this paper, we therefore provide a thematic review of the literatures that address this issue in management and organization studies (MOS) and related fields. While these literatures examine how employee mental health is affected by organizational and occupational structures and managed by organizations and employees, they have paid relatively little attention to the capitalist labour relations which underpin the unhealthy conditions of contemporary working life. They have paid even less attention to how these conditions may be resisted. To help future scholarship in MOS challenge this state of affairs, we draw on some of the most basic but central notions of exploitation, alienation and resistance in classic and current critiques of capitalism, optimistic that this may help strengthen the field's capacity to confront mental unhealth in settings of work and organization.

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