Employers and colleagues have a moral obligation to promote and manage good mental health in the workplace and ensuring this is not neglected saves your business money and ensures your staff feel valued and supported. Estimations suggest that one British adult in four experiences at least one diagnosable mental health disorder in any given year. In the same period the Office of National Statistics believes that around 11 million people experience symptoms associated with poor mental health and around six million have symptoms that meet the diagnostic criteria for mental illness; anxiety and/or depression being the most common.
So-called ‘invisible’ illnesses such as bi-polar, OCD, stress and anxiety defy our need for empirical understanding. We can generally tell when a colleague is suffering from back problems or tonsillitis, but mental health is trickier and ascertaining when a colleague’s stresses are actually symptoms of a profound mental health condition can be highly problematic. Stigma around mental health problems is pervasive and often boils down to fear of the unknown, of seeing those suffering as unpredictable entities which we can’t reliably gauge or reconcile their behaviour as consistent with our own.
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