ScreenME Podcast
The ScreenME Podcast is all about entrepreneurship, particularly within the creative and media industry.
Through her accessible, easy-to-understand approach, the host, Ulrike Rohn, engages in captivating conversations with individuals who bring inspiration and knowledge to the world of entrepreneurship, including start-up entrepreneurs and those dedicated to teaching the entrepreneurial mindset.
Hailing from Tallinn University, where Ulrike Rohn is Professor of Media Management and Media Economics, this podcasts caters to both students and teachers in the creative field and the media.
For university students, the ScreenME Podcast offers a platform to learn from inspiring role models who share their unique journeys into startup entrepreneurship. Some of these guests are recent graduates, providing relatable and practical insights for those embarking on their entrepreneurial endeavors.
For university lecturers and teachers, the ScreenME Podcast serves as a valuable resource to glean experiences, insights, and tricks for facilitating and fostering an entrepreneurial mindset in students.
Tune in to explore the multifaceted world of entrepreneurship through engaging conversations that transcend the boundaries of academia and industry.
The ScreenME Podcast is brought to you by Tallinn University and it's Baltic Film Media and Arts School (BFM) and made possible through the EU-funded Horizon 2020 project on Screen Media Entrepreneurship, ''ScreenME'' (no 952156).
ScreenME Podcast
#26: When passion turns harmful: On well-being & creative careers. A talk with Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Media work can feel like a dream—and still make you sick. In this ScreenME episode, host Ulrike Rohn talks with Mark Deuze (University of Amsterdam) about his new book, Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick (Intellect). Drawing on industry surveys and occupational health research, Deuze unpacks three structural stressors that repeatedly show up across film/TV, journalism, games, music, and advertising: excessive workload, a lack of organizational justice, and poor reciprocity between what creatives put in and what they get back.
The conversation moves from “it’s not you, it’s your work” (healthy boundaries) to what actually helps: professionalizing leadership, improving mental-health literacy, and organizing with peers (“don’t do it alone”). We also touch on recent policy shifts like Australia’s right-to-disconnect and psychosocial-hazard duties of care, and—on the lighter side—Deuze’s life in music with his grunge band Skinflower, a reminder that identity can (and should) be bigger than your job.
Quotes:
“Professionalizing leadership, investing in empathic leadership—leadership that normalizes the discussion around health and wellbeing at work—would make a massive difference.”
“People in general—creative people in particular—are quite poor at recognizing their own emotional health.”
“Love is a transformative force. It can be exploited by a cynical industry, but it can also empower workers to organize.”
“Mental-health literacy is recognizing when you’re crossing a line, recognizing when somebody else might be struggling, and knowing how to help.”
“The industry individualizes its own structural problems… everybody gets a free mental-health app and—problem solved.”
“Whatever you do, don’t do it alone.”
“A simple mind trick—this is not who I am; this is what I do—can have profound consequences.”
Mark Deuze
Mark Deuze is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam’s Faculty of Humanities, having served as its Director of Graduate Studies and as Director of the national Research School for Media Studies (RMeS). Before that he worked as a journalist and academic in the United States at Indiana University Bloomington, in Germany at the University of Münster, and in South Africa at the University of Johannesburg.
His publications include 100+ papers in academic journals and 15 books, including most recently "Well-Being and Creative Careers: What Makes You Happy Can Also Make You Sick“ (published with Intellect, 2025), "Happiness in Journalism” (volume co-edited with Valérie Bélair-Gagnon, Avery Holton and Claudia Mellado, published with Routledge, 2023), “Life in Media” (The MIT Press, 2023), and “McQuail’s Media and Mass Communication Theory” (7th edition published by Sage in 2020, co-authored with the late Denis McQuail; 8th edition scheduled for 2025). Mark’s work has been translated in Chinese, Czech, German, Mongolian, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Turkish, and Hungarian. He is also the bass player and singer of Skinflower (skinflower.bandcamp.com).
Keywords:
creative industries, media work, mental health, burnout, wellbeing at work, organizational justice, reciprocity, workload, leadership in media, mental-health literacy, right to disconnect, psychosocial hazards, journalism, film and TV, games industry, self-exploitation
Host: Ulrike Rohn
Sound engineer: Tanel Kadalipp (episode 1-14), Sangam Panta (episode 15 -
https://bfmentrepreneurhub.tlu.ee/screenme-podcast/
