Talking to your employee about their mental health
The stigma and misconceptions about mental ill-health mean that
employees find talking about their mental health difficult to the
point that many will avoid raising the issue with their employer
for fear of losing their job. Sadly this isn’t a
misconception on the part of people with experience of mental
ill-health. Some people report immediate loss of interest
when they tell a prospective employer about their mental health
history. That is why putting the right health and well-being
policies into practice during the recruitment process and
afterwards is so important and valuable. Ideally you want to
build an ethos and culture in your organisation where everyone is
treated with respect and where honest communication is
encouraged.
Links
to resources
Rethink
Scores of British adults avoid talking to their boss about mental
health problems out of fear of losing their job or being considered
“mad”, new findings suggest.
Rethink is a mental
health membership charity which works to help everyone affected by
severe mental illness to recover a better quality of life. It
carried out a survey which found that almost 60% of British workers
said they would feel uncomfortable talking to their line manager if
they had a mental health condition such as depression, anxiety or
bipolar disorder.
Time to Change - Let’s end mental health
discrimination
Time to Change is an
ambitious programme to end discrimination faced by people who
experience mental health problems. It is run by the mental
health charities, MIND and Rethink. The website includes
blogs on topics such as employment issues. This blog gives an
insight into the challenges of finding and staying in work with a
mental health condition.
Mental health and
employment
Roy
Sainsbury, Annie Irvine, Jane Aston, Sally Wilson, Ceri Williams
and Alice Sinclair, 2008
Department for Work and Pensions, Research
Report No. 513
This report summarises
research carried out by the Social Policy Research Unit and
Institute for Employment Studies University of York on behalf of
the Department for Work and Pensions. It found that there was
a perception among employees that employers viewed people with
mental health conditions as a ‘risk’ or as unreliable or incapable
of coping in their job, and this was a factor in some people’s
reluctance to mention a mental health condition to their current,
or a potential future, employer.
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