October 10 is World Mental Health Day, and the month of October is being observed as World Mental Health month. This year’s theme, ‘make mental health and well-being for all a global priority,’ was chosen to address the inequalities exposed by the COVID-19 Pandemic and its impact on people’s mental health globally. It supports the urgent call for global action to prioritize mental health and address inequitable social determinants. Affordable and accessible mental health services must be ensured at the community level so that no one is left behind. Indeed, mental health for all is a global imperative and the need to address raise awareness around the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental health is an important way forward.
We have created a narrative around mental health as an individual’s issue to solve for through benefits and perks rather than understanding mental health as being ingrained into the way an organization operates and how its people are valued.
Mind Share Partners’ 2021 Mental Health at Work Report
Introduction
Our work lives intersect with our personal lives and are an integral part of who we are, what we do and why we do what we do. Given the significant amount of time we spend every day at work, it is evident that the workplace is a setting that can nurture or adversely impact employees’ mental health.
Workspaces should therefore address with informed perspectives the spectrum of factors that impact employee well-being at work. These include work environment, workload, work stress, work-life integration, bullying, harassment, and discrimination. If these detrimental factors are unaddressed, workspaces face serious repercussions.
These manifest as absenteeism, presenteeism, low productivity, lack of recognition, poor communication practices, unhealthy work practices, conflict, discord, employees working longer hours because of job insecurity or working while unwell, high attrition rates, elevated levels of stress, burn out, mental health conditions and physical health problems.
The National Mental Health Survey of India (2016) estimates that 13.7 percent of people in India will develop a mental health condition at some point in their lives.
A survey (2019) on Workplace Mental Health in India by White Swan Foundation for Mental Health across different age groups and industry sectors in the country revealed several workplace related challenges:
- More than one in two people have a mental health issue
- Two out of three people knew someone at the workplace with a mental health issue
- More than eight out of ten people said that they had few or no discussions on mental health at the workplace
- Only one out of four people receive mental health support at the workplace
- One out of three people said that they would not approach anyone when in distress
- Only one in ten people have access to EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) services
- 50 percent of people said that they would feel most comfortable reaching out to trusted colleague when distressed
The fact that 64 percent of respondents knew someone at the workplace with a mental health issue highlights the widespread nature of the problem. The lack of accessibility to EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) services indicates the widespread nature of the problem. Often people are not aware of how to support a colleague in psychological distress. Workplaces therefore need to have appropriate support systems and policies that will ensure availability, accessibility, and affordability of appropriate services for people in psychological distress.
Given the widespread stigma associated with mental health issues, trainings are imperative for all employees across the organization to learn how to name, normalize and navigate mental health at work that de stigmatize “difficult” conversations and ground them in compassion, concern, and care.
Setting the context
The COVID-19 pandemic (2020) has upended our lives and livelihoods and brought the world to a standstill. Since the last two years, amidst the waxing and waning of the pandemic, across the world, people are coming to terms with the “new normal”—new ways of life and living that would have been sheer fantasy in the pre-pandemic era. Surprisingly, the contemporary workspace bore the brunt of the pandemic with remote working and hybrid model of work becoming the norm rather than exception. The workplace was thus reconfigured in response to a public health crisis. Collectively, many of us realized the urgent need to prioritize mental health at work as the way forward.
Mental health is a spectrum of experiences and every one of us is on the spectrum. There is a growing realisation that mental health must no longer be thought of as a phenomenon impacting the “ill” minority. Increasingly, mental health challenges are an everyday experience and each of us is susceptible at any point in our lives.
Currently, in a post pandemic world, workplace mental health awareness has reached an inflection point. A positive aspect amidst the widespread disruption in our lives is the normalisation of mental health challenges at work. The pandemic and the return to office is changing the way we work. And our work environment, work practices and company culture together play critical roles in out mental health.
In 2019, employees across the globe were just beginning to grasp the prevalence of mental health challenges at the workplace and the need to address the 4S around mental health conditions—Stigma, Shame, Secrecy and Silence—and the emerging link between mental health challenges and Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
Interestingly, in 2020, mental health support at workplaces went beyond a mere tick in the box and a politically correct option to making it business priority to meet the growing clarion call for a healthy and sustainable workplace culture. Fast track to 2021, and the stakes have risen significantly, with greater awareness of the role and impact of workplace factors that can contribute to poor mental health as well as “heightened urgency” around the intersections of mental health with DEI.
Demographics continue to play a pivotal role in workplace mental health. Millennials, Gen Zers and historically underrepresented groups such as persons with disability, entry level employees, people who self-identify on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum, women, people of colour, people belonging to ethnic and racial minority groups, caregivers and people from marginalized communities still struggling most.
Mental ill health is often a symptom of lacklustre DEI within organizations. People from these diversity strands are more likely to quit their jobs due to mental health related issues. People from diverse backgrounds often experience a lack of representation, microaggressions, non-conscious biases and other macro and micro stressors that adversely impact their mental health and endanger their psychological safety. The odds of someone feeling truly included in a workspace when their mental health is impacted is significantly lowered. And as a corollary, mental health is affected when diversity strands are questioned,
Not surprisingly, they strongly believe that the workplace culture must be a Safe Inclusive Supportive Affirmative space responsive to mental health issues through a DEI framework.
The article is part of a series on workplace mental health as a Diversity Equity and Inclusion issue.
