In a recent post on world.edu , two anonymous authors decry the universities’ rush to wind back work-from-home arrangements that were instituted during the COVID crisis. In particular, the authors argue that return-to-office (RTO) arrangements are counterproductive for introverts. Their post adopts a widely-accepted definition of an introvert as someone who finds social encounters taxing, rather than energising, and who needs alone-time to recover.

What I really like about this piece is the way it acknowledges that scholarly work isn’t just solitary mental endeavour but a social practice that is materially and institutionally situated. Academic work is bodily. It draws on, and in turn depletes, our embodied capacities and potentials and changes in our work arrangements cost us in different ways.

But it is also clear the authors are experiencing distress in the workplace and that return-to-office mandates are negatively affecting their potential for scholarly work. In this short piece, I want to explore whether the construct of introversion is the best way to conceptualise the problems return-to-office creates for people like the authors.
Introversion and its complement extraversion are concepts first described by Carl Jung in his 1921 book Personality Types. In the present day, introversion is popularly understood as an attribute relating to energy levels and social engagement, but Jung described it as an orientation to life that focuses on subjective psychic objects — the contents of one’s own mind, one’s emotions and ruminations, etc.

Wikipedia offers this great quote that illustrates the pejorative nature of Jung’s description of the introverted ‘type’ — and foreshadows a serious problem with its validity.

He holds aloof from external happenings, does not join in, has a distinct dislike of society as soon as he finds himself among too many people. In a large gathering he feels lonely and lost. The more crowded it is, the greater becomes his resistance. He is not in the least “with it,” and has no love of enthusiastic get-togethers. He is not a good mixer. What he does, he does in his own way, barricading himself against influences from outside. He is apt to appear awkward, often seeming inhibited, and it frequently happens that, by a certain brusqueness of manner, or by his glum unapproachability, or some kind of malapropism, he causes unwitting offence to people…

And it continues:

His relations with other people become warm only when safety is guaranteed, and when he can lay aside his defensive distrust. All too often he cannot, and consequently the number of friends and acquaintances is very restricted. [Extraversion and introversion, Wikipedia]

The validity problem here is that Jung is describing a person who has problems engaging with other people, participating socially, and making friends. Right off the bat, we can intuit that Jung’s hypothetical introvert might have overlapping concerns, such as social anxiety, and might also “have a touch of the ‘tism,” as kids on TikTok put it. This should put us on notice that it is helpful to consider these overlapping experiences of anxiety and autism whenever we talk about introvert ‘problems’.

Indeed, when I read the books that popularised the notion that introversion is an important way of categorising people, such as Susan Cain’s bestseller Quiet, I can’t shake the feeling that what Cain is often describing as the definite characteristics of introversion could actually reflect social anxiety and autism. I say that as an autistic introvert with social anxiety, so I appreciate these experiences are complex and overlapping and hard to disentangle!

Fixed notions of introversion as a definite type of person don’t always help. They can make it harder to recognise, as Jung did, that every person has both introvert and extravert capacities at the same time; the situational contingency and specificity of introvert traits and practices; and the way in which introversion and extraversion are not poles of a spectrum but a manifold that folds back upon itself in ways that are difficult to appreciate and conceptualise.

I am committed to a constructivist viewpoint, from which these psychological categories may constitute different but equally valid ways of labelling the same experiences. If we take this view, what matters is the different potential for real-world action that each construct presents.

I feel that explaining the problem with return-to-office mandates in terms of introversion might obscure some potential remedies. In particular, the alternative explanations, social anxiety and autism, are, for better or worse, psychological disorders.

It is important to note here that the word ‘disorder’ operates in two distinct senses in the same process of diagnosis. Very unhelpful! It names a particular kind of psychological category — you have ‘a disorder’ — but the presence of disorder forms an element of many diagnoses. If you are not experiencing disorder, distress and dysfunction in your life, you may not be given the diagnosis. Disorder makes the difference between being a ‘neat-freak’ and having obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

As an autistic person, I am uncomfortable with the thought of telling someone their personality and orientation to life might be the products of a disorder but on my blog about mental and public health Boundary Objects, I have argued we should reclaim disorder. We should be frank and upfront about the fact that conditions like anxiety, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are not just interpersonal differences but they can and do cause problems for us.

Disorder and diagnosis are playing a gatekeeping role in this discourse. If return-to-office policies are causing people distress and dysfunction in their work lives, then it may make more sense to explore the vocabulary of disability, to see whether that framing of the experience of disorder opens up potentials and possibilities for compelling large institutions to attend to our needs and experiences.

In particular, anxiety, ADHD and autism all constitute disabilities for the purposes of anti-discrimination law, and this requires large corporations and institutions in many countries, like universities, to offer reasonable adjustments to work practices and the work environment to enable people with these disabilities to participate in public life. What the COVID lockdowns have unequivocally demonstrated is that organisational work continues just fine when people work from home. It has made it much harder to refuse claims for reasonable adjustments by people who experience distress and dysfunction when forced to work in an office.

I held off on writing this piece for quite a while. I did so because I can imagine an obvious objection: ‘why should I have to identify as disabled to get a workplace that fits my needs?’ In response, I want to ask: what’s wrong with disability? Why would it shame someone to acknowledge it and seek accommodations?

The social model of disability acknowledges that disability arises when our social world fails to accommodate our different potentials and capacities to participate in and contribute to public life. Approximately one-third of the Australian population are disabled in some way (and I suspect the proportion would be higher if it did not bear so much stigma).

It may help to remember the constructivist perspective I advocated earlier. A diagnosis or psychological category is a label, not the essential truth of the self. You are making strategic decisions about how to frame your experience in ways that may contribute to institutional changes, both personal and structural.

My practical suggestions

• Before you communicate with human resources about the problems you are facing, I recommend talking with your union, or the disability unit at your institution (if it has one). It is important to learn the coded language of disclosure and to fully understand the ramifications of disclosure, which I have written about here.
• Start documenting the problems that return-to-office is causing you in whatever format works for you. Describe the bodily and emotional costs, as well as the productivity impacts. Journals are a valid source of evidence for the diagnostic process.
• Don’t let a doctor ‘fob you off’ with a script for an selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Make sure you come away with a letter that documents the problems you are reporting and the diagnosis (or a referral to a specialist for further assessment). Ask for a Mental Health Care Plan and find a psychologist or social worker who specialises in the issues you’re facing.

Author Bio: Daniel Reeders (they/them) is a queer and nonbinary writer living with disability. They are studying a PhD in regulation and governance at the Australian National University, looking at how we mobilise communities in response to health issues.