World Mental Health Day 2024: a look at work
“Workplace mental health”. These days the phrase feels a bit buzzy. But good mental health at work — the theme for this year’s World Mental Health Day — is much more than a slogan or a recruitment ad.
Are we genuinely confident that we, our colleagues and team members, feel able to talk about mental health?
Significant progress has been made, no doubt. In the early 2000s, when I started my career, there was no way I would expose feelings of vulnerability at work. Fifteen years ago, I found myself crying in a cubicle having just learned about my mum’s cancer diagnosis. My reaction? I got straight back to work, with hardly a word.
Stressed, angst ridden, worried about balancing care with my job.
Why didn’t I talk to colleagues or managers about the impact of hearing a parent may have months to live?
I just thought, “I’ll be alright.”
Neither I nor my then-workplace knew how to respond, so we chugged along and did our best. As bestselling author and Mental Health Mates founder Bryony Gordon writes in her latest book: mental health responds to life. At the time, this was the environment.
Bryony’s book addresses the elephant in the room in 2024: even now, do we really understand mental health? We’ve moved on from the noughties, no question. Rights at work have improved; well-being initiatives foster acceptance that mental health can sometimes incapacitate, just like any other illness. But there is so much more we need to explore, especially in the workplace.
The World Health Organization reports that 15% of working age adults live with a mental health disorder. The World Economic Forum estimates 12 billion working days are lost annually to depression and anxiety alone — at a cost of £1 trillion to the world economy. Deloitte research found the cost to UK employers from poor employee mental health was around £51 billion.
The economic cost is clear — and that’s before we begin to count the social and human costs, too.
Today, Forward Trust works with employers to understand the workplace impact of addictions. Yet in most cases, this hasn’t filtered into thinking on mental health support. Have we only scratched the surface?
Mental health is complex. Employers don’t hold all the answers. Our mental health involves so many experiences, causes, triggers and aspects we don’t understand. It’s OK for employers to say, “We don’t think we’ve quite got this right yet…but we want to get there.”
We know so little about endocrinological health and female mental health, for example. Understanding the long-term effects of trauma is a work-in-progress. Diverse individual experiences of mental health change the types of support people need or want. Investment in researching these — and many other issues — must keep pace.
What we know already is that talent, energy and contribution are resources which benefit us all. Let’s not keep losing them to poor mental health.
Many employers already work hard to address this. They realise it is a journey, not a destination. At Forward, our initiatives for staff, volunteers and our service users include wellbeing days, Employee Resource Groups, access to therapy or addiction treatment, peer support networks, and reflective practice.
We must all create and nurture a culture where everyone feels able to say something so apparently simple: “My mental health isn’t great at the moment.”