Karoshi: how death by overwork is killing us

“Pick me up now,” she said.

Her voice was normal. Her normal voice, as if she was suggesting we get dinner.

Her words were not merely abnormal, they were terrifying. My sister doesn’t want you to pick her up even when her car is being fixed.

When she gets into the car, all I ask is which hospital she wants to go to. She tells me and swears me to secrecy. Mustn’t worry anyone.

Hours and tests later, a nurse tells me my sister needs me.

Do I have a notebook? Yes, I do. She’s trembling and cold to the touch.

“I need you to write some things down” she says.

Dear Lord, she thinks she’s dying. Hell, I’m afraid she’s dying. I’ll take whatever mad notes come to her at this moment.

She begins: “On my desk you’ll find the folder with the information for Mr Somebody, Mr Somebody Else, Family Whoever, etcetera, etcetera.”

I try to stop her. I try to tell her this can wait. She’s not having it.

“I need you to know where all the documents for this-that-and-the-other are. Promise me you’ll remember this. You know no one else in the office bothers with this sort of thing.”

I promise. I write everything down.

We have under 24 hours to decide when her surgery is going to be, and the only thing she has on her mind is the work waiting for her. Her last words could have been about tax filing. Apparently, we could sort out this business about her life/not-life.

She’s fine. She still works all the time. Near-death was an inconvenience more than a game-changer.

I want to point a finger or two, but can’t. All the sisters are like that. If one of us came home at four or five o’clock, my father would ask if we had taken half-day off.

You might say work is my most significant inheritance. Why couldn’t I have inherited the ability to play the saxophone?

Three quarters of a million people die from work-related killers every year – strokes and ischaemic heart disease – says a paper authored by several institutions, including the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization. This number does not include suicide.

I’m probably the last to know, but there’s a Japanese name for it: karoshi. It literally means “death by overwork.”

I don’t know how it feels to hear it in its natural habitat. I imagine sitting at a wake in Trinidad and asking how someone died. Was it sudden? An accident? Hereditary?

No, it was karoshi, they’d say.

Sounds gentle and dignified, doesn’t it? Also feels like it normalises years of what should be insufferable suffering.

I don’t know if this is a blow we should soften.

We are forever talking about stress, work stress, working too much or too hard. I can hardly imagine how we’d make casual conversation if we didn’t have work to talk about. We are not English, after all; we can’t very well talk about the weather.

But that’s all it is: talk. We don’t do anything about it.

Friends have given me advice on how to manage my work and they have been duly ignored. I have given advice on the same matter and received the same response. Having that good old Protestant work ethic has been admired since…there’ve been Protestants?

Awful as it is to wrap your head around karoshi, what’s even more horrible is the way we’ve glamorised it, and, in so doing, encouraged it. Go back to the 80s and the slew of movies making greed good and cheering on advancement at any cost. And that was just the beginning of our worst selves. Now we’re happy to applaud deceit and kicking someone down a stairwell if it means you get ahead.

Working too hard means different things to all of us. As individuals, yes, but also as groups. It’s clearly a big deal in Japan, since they bothered to come up with a word for it. I’m told the self-disappointment and shame that comes with losing a job in their culture is the stuff suicides are made of.

And what are the kinds of overwork of which we speak? Must it be cerebral, or does manual labour count?

I know loss or lack of work everywhere is a dreadful scourge. On our own islands, laid-back as we like to say we are, there are people who don’t stop.

I may cross the line and give friends advice, but I do not take that liberty with you.

But do have a care. Try to find balance.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern.

Many people suffer from more than one condition.