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Mental health professionals (MHP) are responsible for maintaining a safe and therapeutic milieu for psychiatric patients. They make behavioral observations, respond to physiological and psychological signals, identify complications, and manage medications. Their role is valuable to the millions of psychiatric service users who rely on their care, but their specialty has been criticized and delegitimized for decades. To shed light on the struggles that MHPs encounter, I used semi-structured interviews to examine how psychiatrists (n=3), mental health (MH) nurse practitioners (NP) (n=21), and MH registered nurses (RN) (n=24) perceive and manage stigma. I also explore how these MHPs navigate their professional status when they have larger organizational and institutional pressures that delegitimize their work. I find that the MHPs in my sample experience associative stigma after being discouraged from entering the MH specialty, being denied jobs on medical units, and being perceived as unintelligent. Associative stigma causes participants to feel frustrated, disappointed, and hurt as well, and MHPs cope via disregard, avoidance, challenging, humor, self-care, and social support. Additionally, I find that moral distress is a broader implication of stigma for the nurses in my sample. Stigma-related moral distress occurs when NPs and RNs directly or indirectly witness psychiatric patients being stigmatized and mistreated by non-MH workers and institutions. Moral distress also arises for NPs and RNs during situations involving inapppropriate treatment recommendations, time constraints, and patient death. These morally distressing situations cause the nurses in my study to feel angry, frustrated, helpless, and hurt, and they use challenging, social support, and self-care to cope. Finally, I show that MHPs are struggling to secure legitimacy within the broader field of medicine on a professional (between psychiatrists and MH NPs), organizational (insurance companies failing to provide comparable mental and physical health coverage), and societal level (through the media). My hope is that this research pushes scholars to turn their attention toward MHPs in order to develop policies that address their unique needs.

Since the mid-1800s significant changes have occurred within organizations to increase profits and decrease worker's self- interests. As a result, labor process theorists have developed multiple explanations for understanding how control has changed during successive phases of capitalism. Unfortunately, most of the literature to date has placed little to no emphasis on comparing how past forms of control resemble today’s contemporary workplace. For this reason, my study utilizes an extended case method (ECM) in a rural northeastern corrugated box factory to determine whether workers still consent to control through Buroway’s (1979) concept of making-out. I find that instead of taking part in a game that is enforced by managers, workers focus on self- monitoring and a system of categorization as forms of control. By placing workers into groups not only do they create inequality, but they also strengthen the iron cage making it more difficult to resist the informal rules they created.