Staying in the Workforce with Fibromyalgia

Remaining employed with fibromyalgia can be difficult in the increasingly precarious work world, where employees are expected to be healthy and able to consistently meet their job demands. Fibromyalgia also lacks medical legitimacy, which brings a risk of damaged workplace relationships and potential workplace discrimination for people with this illness, affecting mostly women. Their home lives may also impact their ability to remain employed, in conjunction with their impairments. Yet, despite varying degrees of pain, fatigue, and other health issues, 44% of Canadians with fibromyalgia remain in the workforce. How do they do it? This thesis aimed to understand how, given the challenges of remaining employed, these women stay at work. It also considered other stakeholders in the women’s employment and what discourses underlie the accounts of all three groups. The thesis comprised two studies. First, a critical discourse analysis of fibromyalgia information materials found that they generally portray employment as incompatible with fibromyalgia and, when they very rarely mention work, employees are seen as responsible for self-managing their symptoms on the job. The second study sought the perspectives of women with fibromyalgia, their family members and workmates on how the women remained employed. That study found that employed women with fibromyalgia improvised disclosure dances to respond to everyday disclosure risks in workplace relationships. They and their family members and workmates portrayed the women as normal, valuable employees who had not ‘given in’ to their fibromyalgia. Social relationships, from empathetic to conflicted, figured prominently in these two identity-management strategies, through which participants tried to stop the stigma process. The thesis findings highlight the importance of workplace social relations to job retention for employees with invisible impairments. Implications for work disability literature, research using the triad/dyad data-collection method, workplace practice, internal and state workplace policy, and rehabilitation practice are discussed.

Department dc:contributor.department

Rehabilitation Science

Year dc:date.issued

2015

Author dc:creator

• Oldfield, Margaret A.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• MacEachen, Ellen

• chronic illness
• disclosure
• employment
• fibromyalgia
• identity management
• triad data collection method

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1807/71587

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:utoronto.scholaris.ca:1807/71587