The mental health of workers has never been more important than it is today as we struggle with today’s CoVid-19 crisis. Below is a guest column I wrote several years ago for our local newspaper on how businesses are stepping up care for the mental well-being of their workers.
Companies put more effort into creating supportive environments, realizing employee mental health affects their bottom line
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives, wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard, who grew up in the 1950s amid Pittsburgh’s thriving industrial economy. For many of us, a good deal of our lives is spent at work.
Research shows that most of us are on the job between one-fourth and one-third of our lives—90,000 hours, on average, over a lifetime. On a daily basis, that means we spend more waking hours at work than we do at home. We also have more interpersonal exchanges with co-workers than we do with family members. Because of this, work plays a significant role in our overall sense of well-being.
Companies are putting more effort into creating supportive working environments because they better understand the effect an employee’s mental health has on the bottom line. In the United States, workplace mental health problems result in as much as $500 billion of lost productivity annually. Worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, the loss is calculated at $1 trillion. With one in five people in the United States affected by a mental health condition each year, it makes good business sense to understand what’s involved in sustaining a mentally healthy lifestyle.
Mental health involves our emotional, psychological and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel and act. It also plays a part in how we make decision, handle stress and relate to one another. Because mental health problems affect our thinking, mood and behavior, they are more difficult to diagnose and treat. It’s also why some people hesitate to seek medical treatment in the early stage of a mental health condition.
Like physical illnesses, knowing the “symptoms” of a mental illness is important, but unlike physical illnesses, there are no reliable biological markers to tell us something is medically wrong. For mental health conditions, we have to look to our everyday lives for signs of potential problems. This may include sleeplessness or sleeping too much, anxiety, persistently low feelings, an inability to concentrate, obsessive thoughts, even hearing voices.
We usually don’t hesitate to seek medical treatment for physical illnesses like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, but we often put off getting help for a mental health problem, thinking it might pass. It’s important to think of a mental illness like we do a physical illness, where early intervention allows doctors to develop a plan of action that hopefully will halt the progression of the disease.
According to Mental Health America (MHA), a community-based nonprofit that promotes early identification and intervention, it typically takes ten years from the time symptoms first occur until a patient gets a correct diagnosis and proper treatment. MHA’s early intervention campaign—B4Stage4—encourages people to participate in online screenings to determine if the symptoms they’re experiencing are signs of a mental health condition, such as OCD, depression or anxiety.
My husband, Steve, was diagnosed with a mental illness in the early 1990s when there were no online screenings and few people talked openly about such things. He began showing signs of a mental illness before my daughter’s first birthday, and doctors didn’t find the combination of medications to stabilize his mind until she was nine years old. Those were challenging years, and I wrote about my experience of raising three children with a husband who has a mental illness in the book “Rambler: A Family Pushes Through the Fog of Mental Illness.”
I write how my how his “symptoms didn’t manifest in any medically discernable manner, like a lump on a breast or and an elevated PSA number. Instead, they crept into our life over a period of several years, an indefinable force that disrupted routines and changed our lives without our knowing it was happening.”
My husband worked as a mechanical engineer prior to the onset of his mental illness, something he was no longer able to do after he got sick. I often wonder if our experience with his illness would have been different if, at the onset of symptoms, he’d received good medical treatment.
Today there is a greater awareness of the signs suggesting that someone is experiencing mental health problems, which is why companies are working to create environments that support good mental health. After all, that’s where most of us spend most of our day.”
