If you ask people in difficult and challenging occupations whether they use gallows or sick humour in the workplace they generally say that they do. If you ask them why, what purpose it serves, they tend to agree on three things: that it helps relieve stress and tension that could inhibit effective work; it helps to distance them from traumatic aspects of the work allowing them to remain sane in 'insane' circumstances; and it helps to foster social cohesion among members of a work team. In my own research (Sullivan, 2000), social workers in children's services spoke of the purgative power of gallows humour: ...it allowed us to vent all our feelings about these children so we could face them totally cleansed, and the more we spoke negatively about a particular child the more we could see them positively.
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