When the pandemic sent most of the working population home to adapt to remote employment, many became, admittedly, quite comfortable in pajamas. In fact, when employers began requesting hybrid or full-time return to their businesses, employees pushed back. Some also experienced varying degrees of anxiety and faced other mental health challenges as a result of their new home-based environment. Dr. Frieda Wiley dives into this phenomenon and the overall effects that telecommuting continues to have on mental health, in her latest science-backed book, Telecommuting Psychosis: From Surviving to Thriving While Working in Your Pajama Pants.
Wiley comes at the issue from a deeply personal place. When she first began telecommuting as a hybrid employee, back in 2010, the transition was not as seamless as pandemic-era remote working has often seemed. However, after going 100 per cent remote in 2012, she realized she needed more resources to do her best work. At the time, there were very few books and little research on how telecommuting affects mental health. As the lone telecommuter in her department for more than a year, Wiley had little support in either her company or personal life. As a result, she began researching answers and trying to craft her own solutions for the gaps that this phenomenon left unfilled and unanswered.
Wiley is a public speaker, author, journalist, award-winning writer, pharmacist, and has been a telecommuter for more than a decade. She spent eight years researching the effects of working from home on mental health and how to protect it.
“I wrote [the] book,”says Wiley, “not only as a form of therapy and self-validation, but more importantly, to let other people know they are not alone and to give them hope. It’s science-backed with recent research, but also written in plain language so that anybody can understand it.”
Wiley has written for O, The Oprah Magazine, WebMD, Costco Connection, The History Network, The National Institutes of Health (NIH), and US News along with numerous pharmaceutical companies, universities, and associations. She holds undergraduate degrees in biochemistry and Spanish, after a brief career as an aerospace chemist—as a break between degrees—she earned her doctorate in pharmacy with the hopes of working in the pharmaceutical industry as a researcher.
“Life threw me a curveball when a family situation caused me to walk away from a government fellowship and practice as a pharmacist instead,” Wiley says. “I began freelance writing shortly after I began practicing and made the full leap into contract medical writing.”
She reports that the journey of developing this book afforded her much more clarity than the research itself. Wiley discovered her own passion and continues to receive positive feedback from her findings, strategies, and perspective. ◊
You can buy the book here.
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