How can HR Support Employees with Mental Health Issues?

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How can HR Support Employees with Mental Health Issues?

For most of history, HR has tended to avoid or ignore employees with mental health issues. HR will react to these individuals when they become a problem employee. Statistically, 20% of all adults will have a mental health event in their lifetime. If the event impacts your work performance, you will probably find many HR organizations are not equipped to deal with issue, nor do they treat the employee fairly.

I know treatment of people with mental health issues has improved in some countries, but there is still more to be done. What should HR do to help an employee with mental health issues? And how does HR support an employee where a dependent family member (i.e. spouse or child) needs help? From personal experience, I believe HR needs to do more to support employees. Reducing the lost time and improving organizational responses should help improve operations and productivity. Do you agree?

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		1 Jaap de Jonge Editor, Netherlands
	Mental Health at Work Recent research reveals that mental health has a much higher profile than it did a generation ago, but the job is far from done. - 34% of employees report that their financial situation negatively affects their mental health. However 56% of employees do not feel comfortable talking about money issues at work. - 37% of those aged 18-29 have been formally diagnosed with a mental health condition. Compared to 29% of employees over 50. Recommendations: - EMPLOYERS must wake up to the prevalence and impact of mental health issues in the workplace and make it their priority to establish parity between physical and mental health. - MANAGERS must reset their approach to make the same reasonable adjustment for mental health as physical health to enable people with mental health issues to remain in or return to work. Source: Mental Health at Work 2018 Summary Report – Seizing the Momentum

		1 Maria Vilma Elle Student (MBA), Philippines
	Remedies for Health Condition of Employees Sometimes the mental condition of a person cannot be determined right away during interviews nor even using neuropsychiatric examination. Their illness sometimes occurs during their employment because they could not handle stress in the workplace. As HR personnel we need to assess their performance and do some interventions to determine whether their level of performance improved. However, if in cases that despite interventions, still they do not perform well, they must be referred to a proper health practitioner to examine their illness. Maybe management could offer him/her a retirement option that would also benefit his/her family. In some real cases, the reason why people got mentally disturbed at work is because their income or salary is not sufficient to cope with the high cost of living.