Mental Illness Interfering With Work

Mental Health And Working At Home

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more of us have found ourselves working from home. While it can be gratifying to be free of the daily commute and its related expenses, there are still plenty of drawbacks to working remotely that can take a toll on your mental health.

Many people feel isolated away from the workplace, disconnected from the support and social aspects of being among colleagues. It can be extremely stressful living and working in the same place every day, especially if its a small space, youre looking after young children, or you have other family members also working from home. Endless back-to-back virtual meetings, longer work hours, and feeling the need to always be on can also be a drain on your time, mood, and outlook.

Whether youre working from home full-time or just intermittently, there are steps you can take to ensure you protect your mental health and make it a more productive and enjoyable experience.

Maintain a regular work routine. When youre working from home, it can be very difficult to establish a boundary between work and home time, so many people find themselves worker much longer hours. To maintain a sense of normalcy, try to keep regular office hours, starting and finishing at the same time every day. Some people find it useful to go for a walk before starting work in the morning and then again after finishing work in the evening. It can help you mentally switch from work to home mode and vice versa.

New Approach Needed To Tackle Mental Ill

04/03/2015 – Health and employment services should intervene earlier, involve key stakeholders and ensure they work together in order to help people with mental-health issues find work and stay in a job, according to a new OECD report.

Fit Mind, Fit Job: From Evidence to Practice in Mental Health and Work says that around 30% to 40% of all sickness and disability caseloads in OECD countries are related to mental-health problems. The total cost of mental illness is estimated at around 3.5% of GDP in Europe.

For further information or a copy of the report, journalists should contact .

Serious Signs Your Employee Has A Mental Health Issue

Mental health and mental health-related symptoms are one of the most common reasons an employee may take time off from work. The effects of a mental health issue can also keep productivity and revenue down in the workplace, as well as create unrest within the culture of the company. In addition to the effects your employees mental health has on the success and growth of your company, there is often also concern over your employees well-being that is personal and sincere. Issues with mental health can leave a person feeling stressed, tired, anxious, and more.

Its important to act early if you suspect your employee is experiencing a problem with their mental health. For the sake of your business, as well as the health of the employee, early intervention is necessary. When you notice one or more of these important signs, it may be time to intervene:

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Employers Are Obligated By Law To Provide A Safe And Healthy Workplace

The Act defines ‘discrimination’ to include both direct and indirect discrimination. This means an employer’s failure to make reasonable adjustments for a worker with a mental health condition may constitute discrimination, even when on the face of it no ‘direct’ discrimination has occurred. Visit Heads Up for an explanation of reasonable adjustments.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has developed a brief guide to the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 . Visit Australian Human Rights Commission for this guide.

How I Might Recognize Signs Of Psychiatric Or Mental Health Conditions In The Workplace

While a single symptom or isolated event is rarely a sign of a psychiatric or mental health condition, a symptom that occurs frequently, lasts for several weeks, or becomes a general pattern of an individuals behavior may indicate the onset of a more serious mental health problem that requires treatment. Some of the most significant indications of possible concern include:

• confused thinking strange or grandiose ideas,
• prolonged severe feelings of depression or apathy,
• feelings of extreme highs or lows,
• heightened anxieties, fears, anger or suspicion blaming others,
• social withdrawal, diminished friendliness, increased self-centeredness,
• denial of obvious problems and a strong resistance to offers of help,
• dramatic, persistent changes in eating or sleeping habits,
• substance abuse,
• thinking or talking about suicide.

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The Ada And Psychiatric Disability In The Workplace

• Definitions. The ADA defines disability as a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities. When job applicants or employees have a mental health condition that meets this criteria, they have workplace rights under the ADA. The ADA Amendments Act of 2008 recently broadened the definition of disability to provide legal protections against employment discrimination for more individuals with disabilities, including people with psychiatric disabilities.
• Record of psychiatric disability. The ADA also prohibits discrimination against individuals who have a record of a psychiatric disability or are regarded as having a psychiatric disability. This means, for example, that qualified individuals who have a history of psychiatric disability cannot be discriminated against just because of that history. Also, employers cant take actions because they believe a qualified applicant or employee might have a psychiatric disability.
• Rights under the ADA. Applicants and employees with psychiatric disabilities have two main rights under the ADA. First, they have a right to privacy. Except when asking for an accommodation, they can choose whether to tell the employer about their disability. Second, they have a right to a job accommodation unless this causes undue hardship for the employer.

How To Talk About Your Mental Health With Your Employer

Up to 80% of people will experience a diagnosable mental health condition over the course of their lifetime, whether they know it or not. The prevalence of symptoms is the same from the C-suite to individual contributors, but almost 60% of employees have never spoken to anyone at work about their mental health status. Even though managers, direct reports, and colleagues have been more vulnerable than ever due to shared societal challenges and the blurring of the personal and professional during the past 18 months, the effects of stigma can still loom large. The author presents four strategies for disclosing your own mental health challenges at work.

In retrospect, a simple accommodation early on likely couldve prevented all of that, saving me tremendous personal turmoil and my organization the extra workload.

What I didnt know then is that up to 80% of people will experience a diagnosable mental health condition over the course of their lifetime, whether they know it or not. The prevalence of symptoms is the same from the C-suite to individual contributors, but almost 60% of employees have never spoken to anyone at work about their mental health status. Many high performers, including anxious achievers like myself, have strengths that often result from these challenges. I was not nearly as alone as I thought.

Also Check: Northern Virginia Mental Health Institute

Practical Points: Job Accommodations

Working With A Mental Health Condition

Millions of Americans living with mental health conditions lead happy, successful lives. People with very serious mental health and substance abuse problems might have trouble with basic needs, like finding a place to live, a job, or health care. Learn more about your legal rights, finding a job, and how to stay healthy during stressful transitions.

Also Check: Serenity Mental Health Centers Denver

Should I Tell People I Work With That I Have A Mental Health Condition

There is no law that requires you to share personal health information, including mental health conditions, with anyone you work with. Telling others about your mental health condition can affect your job in the future. If you want to tell someone you work with about your mental health illness, think about your reasons carefully. It might help to make a list of the good and bad outcomes of telling your manager or someone in human resources.

Your employer must make reasonable accommodations if they know about your mental health condition, but employers do not have to accommodate disabilities that they dont know about. This may help you decide whether you tell your employer about your mental health condition.

Learn more reasons to tell or not tell your employer about a mental health condition from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Coalition and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Preparing: Explore Your Comfort Level

How much are you comfortable sharing? How much do you actually need to share to achieve your goal? This could be as detailed as your diagnosis and history if youre especially close with your manager. Or, it could be as little as, Ive been having a hard time because of the pandemic. Is it okay if I take Monday and Tuesday off?

As a new hire, still trying to prove myself and terrified of professional repercussions, I hadnt wanted to share anything about my anxiety diagnosis upfront. However, I very likely could have achieved my goal of flexible work hours to go to my therapy appointments by sharing much less.

If youre not comfortable speaking with your manager, you may prefer to speak with HR or another manager. Its important to have a sense of psychological safety with whomever you choose. Note that your direct manager is typically required to share employee health information that impacts work with HR not to be punitive, but to ensure consistency across managers and access to the full array of resources.

Consider in more detail what specific resources or solutions for flexible work you think would be most helpful. You may want to have these ready to name in your conversation. Examples include everything from routine therapy appointments to more frequent check-ins to offline hours or protected time to focus on work.

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Workplace Risk Factors For Mental Health

Common work-related challenges that can negatively impact your mental health include:

• Long, inflexible hours, short-staffing due to cutbacks or unfilled vacancies, or an ever-increasing workload.
• Working remotely with no clear separation between work and personal time.
• A toxic workplace that fosters bullying, harassment, or abuse.
• Lack of training or guidance for the role youre expected to fulfill.
• Limited or unclear communication from management about tasks, goals, or decision-making.
• Lack of support, shortage of equipment or other job resources, or unsafe working practices.

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What Are Reasonable Adjustments

Under the Equality Act 2010 employers must take certain actions to help people with disabilities. This includes many people with a mental illness.

Under the Act employers have a duty to change their procedures and practices. They must do this to remove the barriers people face because of a disability.

Disabled people can ask employers to change their procedures and practices, as long as it is reasonable. The Act calls this the duty to make reasonable adjustments.

The Equality Act defines a disability as being:

• a physical or mental impairment,
• long term has lasted at least 12 months or likely to last 12 months, and
• has a substantial adverse effect on your ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities.

You can ask for reasonable adjustments during the recruitment process. So, you might ask for a reasonable adjustment to make it easier for you to go to an interview. You can also ask them if you get the job.

Reasonable adjustments for employees with a mental health condition include:

• offering flexible working patterns, including changes to start and finish times and adaptable break times,
• changing your working environment, for example providing a quiet place to work,
• working with you to create an action plan to help you manage your condition, and
• allowing you leave to attend appointments connected to your mental health.

You can find more information Discrimination and mental health by clicking here.

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Listen To This Article

To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, .

Havent we all been Naomi Osaka at some point in our lives?

OK, we may never know what its like to be the second-ranked woman in tennis, or the worlds highest-paid female athlete.

But like the sports star, many of us have been stuck in situations that were detrimental to our mental health at work or in our personal lives feeling torn between societal expectations and self-preservation.

Ms. Osaka chose to care for herself ahead of the French Open, when she announced she would not do any press because the news conferences could be damaging to the mental health of the players. True to her word, after winning her first-round match on Sunday, she skipped her postmatch news conference. As she later explained in an , she was feeling vulnerable and anxious, and press events give her huge waves of anxiety.

Her decision to avoid the press did not go over well with tennis officials. Ms. Osaka was fined $15,000, and the leaders of the four Grand Slam tournaments the Australian, French and United States Opens, and Wimbledon threatened to expel her from the French Open.

Instead, Ms. Osaka announced she would withdraw from the tournament. The truth is that I have suffered long bouts of depression since the U.S. Open in 2018 and I have had a really hard time coping with that, she wrote in her social media post.

Kally Doyle A Licensed Mental Health Counselor

Your mental health deserves to be accounted for just make sure to have a plan in place for paying bills, prioritizing your self-care, and that youve identified how long this break from working will last.

Suppose you talk to a supervisor who puts these changes into effect, but you still feel anxiety, depression, or burnt out. In that case, Magavi recommends looking for another job or taking a mental health leave of absence.

Think about the long-term impact on your mental health when you envision quitting your job. If you plan to take time off from work, will that benefit you or be difficult in a different way? Prolonged periods of idle time may exacerbate feelings of hopelessness and lethargy. Many individuals benefit from the structure and routine of workthey may socialize more and feel more confident and independent, says Magavi. Of course, this varies from person to person, so be honest about what makes sense for you.

Additionally, look at what your life will realistically look like socially and financially. Your mental health deserves to be accounted forjust make sure to have a plan in place for paying bills, prioritizing your self-care, and that youve identified how long this break from working will last, says Doyle.

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