“It Ain’t Just the Body That Suffering,Is the Mind Too”: Occupational Health Governance and Psychological Wellbeing Among Sugarcane Workers in Guyana

Occupational health and safety (OHS) governance is not experienced in a culturally neutral way. The meanings workers bring to risk, authority, voice, and institutional protection are shaped by the cultural worlds in which they live and labour, yet this dimension of occupational health has received almost no qualitative attention in the Caribbean and Latin America. This study explored how sugarcane workers in Guyana experience OHS governance and what those experiences reveal about the relationship between culture, working conditions, and psychological wellbeing. Fourteen male workers were recruited through snowball sampling and interviewed by telephone using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA). Four master themes emerged: employer accountability experienced as absent; protective standards experienced as inadequate; worker voice experienced as structurally suppressed; and an occupational psychological health burden experienced as unrecognised. Findings indicate that inadequate protection was absorbed rather than contested, silence was communally sustained, and psychological distress was carried privately and without institutional recognition. The cultural world these workers inhabit shaped not only their exposure to governance failures but the very terms on which those failures were lived and made sense of. Culturally grounded approaches to OHS policy and occupational mental health are not supplementary considerations but preconditions of meaningful worker protection.