Emotion work in a mental health service setting

The purpose of this article is to describe emotion work within a crisis resolution home treatment team in Norway. As defined by Hochschild, “emotion work” refers to managing one’s emotions according to what is culturally acceptable within a particular situation. A crisis resolution home treatment team is of particular interest when studying emotion work, because it represents a working environment where mental health crises and suicidal threat are common and where managing emotions is necessary for the team to function well. We aimed to expand current knowledge of the particular ways in which emotion work may be done by observing and describing the daily work of such a team. Our analyses showed that team members’ emotion work had five main features: (1) emotional expression was common and there seemed to be an informal rule that “vulnerable” emotions could be expressed; (2) emotional expression was most commonly observed in post-event discussions of challenging events or service users; (3) emotional expression facilitated digesting or processing of the event with the help of a fellow team member; (4) emotional expression was met with validation and support; and (5) this support seemed to increase mentalization and understanding of the situation and could be offered only by other team members. An implication of these findings is that informal exchanges of emotion are a necessary part of the work and cannot occur outside of the work context.