THE dark nights are stalking with a vengeance and hot on their tail is the long, not-so-mellow season of coughs, colds and unspecified winter ailments. Most of us battle on, the snuffling wounded, still managing to shuffle into work, even if we do feel a bit under the weather. Flu, though, is different. A real bout of influenza will floor you and force you to take your symptoms seriously enough to stay home in bed. When we are really ill, time off work is mandatory and there is no dilemma about "should I, shouldn’t I?"
Why then, when we are mentally unwell or emotionally exhausted, do we still feel compelled to drag ourselves into work, hell-bent on ignoring the symptoms of a troubled mind and heart? And while we are vigilant about not scattering our current cold virus around colleagues in the office, we are much less aware about the interplay and cross-fertilisation between our own mental health and that of others around us – especially at work.
These are some of the many questions addressed in a report on mental health and work. Called Thriving At Work, it was commissioned by Theresa May and published last week. The report’s authors, Lord Dennis Stevenson and Paul Farmer (Chief Executive of Mind) have produced a set of core standards on how employers can make work a much more psychologically safe and healthy place for employees. Key recommendations include making employees more aware of their own and others’ mental health and encouraging open dialogue about the help available through work when someone is struggling. To support this, the report says managers need more training and understanding on mental health issues so that they can make helpful and timely interventions when there is a problem. Above all, the report strongly recommends that every workplace – no matter how big or small – should develop and communicate a mental health plan that acknowledges and responds to the fact that most of us struggle at some stage and to varying degrees with our mental health. Our state of mind is never static and is constantly reacting to an internal world of thoughts and feelings and to our experience of the world around us.
Given that we spend half of our waking hours in work, it’s a no-brainer that employers should take a pro-active and meaningful lead on mental health. For many of us, work is our second home, our second family. We don’t stop being the person we are when we step over the office threshold. Being at work means we have to shift focus from the personal and domestic, to the task at hand. Depending on the size and nature of our personal and domestic problems, the transition from home to work can vary from easy and smooth to downright impossible. There is also the tricky contraflow between work and home, which can adversely affect a whole family. Our lives are lived on a spectrum that most of us manage to navigate much of the time. But there are periods when we simply can’t manage. The death of a parent, the end of a relationship or being bullied or excluded at work are the sorts of stressors that can tip the balance so that we can no longer keep all the plates spinning. Some will drop and shatter.
It’s in moments like these, that we need to be careful. Forget about being "brave" and getting extra brownie points from your boss for limping into work when you’re dying inside, or worse, when you’re so confused and exhausted you don’t even realise that you’re dying inside. If this is how it is, your primary responsibility is to yourself and your own mental health. Carrying on working without seeking help or support and without telling your manager at work that you really are struggling to cope, isn’t a good strategy. In fact, the more you deny your problems, the more compounded they become so that life at home and at work becomes one big, messy, overwhelming soup. It’s that old adage of "a stitch in time": taking time off work to look after our mental health is sometimes the most strategic thing to do. It may be a day that we take as sick leave or an impromptu holiday to address a psychological or life problem that is simmering and coming to an inevitable boil. Many of us leave it too late: we keep going until we crash and burn, requiring us to take more time away from work to recover.
It’s time we started owning our mental health and stopped pretending that it really doesn’t apply to us. And it’s high time employers woke up to the human and economic cost of sick workplaces.
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