MENTAL HEALTH
Amy Whitelock
businesses £8.4billion.5
On top
of this, staff turnover can cost up to £2.4billion per year, while presenteeism due to mental ill health amounts to £605 per employee.
MILLIONS OF EMPLOYEES ARE FORCED TO LIE ABOUT STRESS
increasing levels of stress among employees. Small wonder, given the multiple pressures people are facing due to the recession – worries about money, job security, spending cuts to name a few – which pile in on top of the existing causes of stress from inside and outside the workplace.
T
Mind has been calling for action on mental health at work since May, through our ‘Taking care of business’ campaign, so this growing awareness of the scale of the problem is welcome. But it’s not sufficient simply to recognise the reality – now it needs to be addressed, in every single workplace.
What’s the problem?
Time and again, research shows that work-induced stress is a huge problem – and one that employers can ill afford to ignore. According to a 2007 study, up to five million workers feel ‘very’ or ‘extremely’ stressed by their work and half a million people are so stressed they think it’s making them ill. 1
The recession and subsequent pressures on private and public sector finances have only made matters worse. Mind’s research found one in ten workers have sought support from their doctors and seven per cent have started taking antidepressants for stress and mental health problems directly caused by the
40 nhe
pressures of recession on their workplace. 2
In October, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development reported that stress is now the biggest cause of long-term absence among public sector workers, 3
problem in the workplace.4 while the
TUC revealed stress is now the most common health and safety
This all adds up to a deeply worrying trend, with damaging consequences for individual employees, but also for businesses. The Centre for Mental Health has calculated that 70 million working days are lost each year due to stress and mental health problems, costing
his autumn has seen a tranche of media stories about the
Behind all these figures, why is unmanageable stress such a significant feature of our workplaces? There is one simple answer – although many people wrongly believe mental health problems to be very rare, one in four people will experience one at some point in their lives and many more will experience undiagnosed mental distress. Ultimately, we all have mental health, just as we all have physical health, and our mental wellbeing shifts along a spectrum.
Work can have a huge impact on where we are on that spectrum. Negative or bullying relationships, unrealistic expectations, unmanageable workloads, poor communication, a culture of long hours and no breaks – all these can severely impact on the mental wellbeing, and indeed the productivity, of employees. In the light of all this and the external pressures on businesses, it’s no wonder there has been such an increase in staff experiencing stress or mental distress.
The final workplace taboo? Yet despite this reality – and the growing public and professional recognition of it – Mind’s research shows that the problem is simply not being addressed, largely because mental health is still taboo in the workplace.
We found stress has forced one in five workers to call in sick but 93 per cent lied to their boss about the reason why.6 People cited stomach upsets, headaches, housing problems or family illness, rather than admit the true cause of their absence. Employees are clearly
Nov/Dec 10
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