Work is a fundamental feature of adult life for most people. Work is good for us. It produces personal, economic and social benefits. Work in just and favorable conditions produces positive health results for an individual and significantly contributes to a person’s identity. In fact, a key component of an individual’s mental health is the ability to adequately fulfill his or her roles, including capacity to work. However, work causes adverse psychological and physical responses when the resources of the individual are not sufficient to cope with the demands of work. Both, the content and context of work can play a role in the development of mental health problems in workplace.
In the past few decades, nature of work has changed rapidly, and continues to do so at an alarming rate. Globalization, urbanization and advances in technology have resulted in fast pace of life, erosion of leisure time, over-employment, underemployment and mingling of work and home time. In all, work today is highly stress provoking and workplace mental health issues have become very common.
In India, nearly half of the employees suffer from some kind of stress [1]. Some studies even show that as many as 42.5% of corporate employees in India suffer from depression [2]. The treatment gap for mental illness in India is 83% [3], which means that most of the affected individuals go untreated. From a cultural perspective, mental disorders are associated with a considerable amount of stigma in the Indian society, leading to neglect and marginalization. Therefore, from a moral perspective, there is a compelling case for workplace mental health in India.
From the economic perspective, poor workplace mental health is very bad for business. Work affects an employee's mental health, while in turn an employee’s mental health affects work in form of poor productivity, absenteeism and high attrition rate. The World Health Organization (WHO) pegs the per year cost of depression and anxiety to the global economy at US $ 1 trillion. Given that the contribution of India to global GDP is 7.45%, the loss translates for India as a whopping US $ 74.5 billion per year. Employers in India understand the linkage between employee engagement and productivity but have not yet realized that mental health could be the missing link between their efforts and desired results in the area of employee engagement. A mentally healthy workplace and increased employee engagement are interdependent. Globally, Stress at the workplace is considered to be No 1 health risk factor that is a deterrent in building an engaged workforce and culture [4]. As far as absenteeism is concerned, while no India-specific statistics are available, it cannot be denied that a large part of sick days taken by employees are work-stress related, albeit disguised as stomachaches, headaches etc. Presenteeism – a condition where employees turn up for work when not in full health and consequently do not work, is another major source of the financial loss.
Whilst significant progress has been made in North America and the European Union (especially UK) in the direction of workplace mental health, corporate India has much to catch up on. There is a necessity for a comprehensive organizational approach towards mental health at workplace in India. While Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are good to have, mental health professionals need to work with employers to build preventive aspects in their employee experiences through resilience building training programs and workshops. Periodic mental health risk assessments can help in measuring the effectiveness of workplace mental health initiatives. A combination of upstream or preventive measures like resilience training and downstream or remedial measures like EAPs will provide the best line of defense for corporates against mental ill-health at workplace.
Did you know that sometimes
an email can trigger the same bio-psychological response in a human that is
triggered in a zebra when attacked by a lion? It's known as the classic
fight-or-flight response. A nasty email or a 'Stinker' can set off the Sympathetic
Nervous System, which spills the 'stress soup' (cortisol, adrenaline,
nor-adrenaline etc) in your body. As a result, the stinker increases your heart
rate, increases your blood sugar, dilates your pupils, contracts your muscles,
temporarily shuts off your digestion, increases your breathing and constricts
your blood vessels. As bizarre as it sounds, an email can literally prep you up
to run or fight. This is the stress response that evolved in our brains in the
ancestral environment to prepare us for lethal conflicts. Our environment has
evolved so rapidly in past century, specially in the past few decades that it
has resulted in an evolutionary mismatch. The traits that protected us in the
ancestral environment are misfiring in the modern environment. Luckily for the
zebra, once the threat has passed, it can shut off the stress response and
focus on more constructive activities in life, like grazing. However, we humans
have to bear the curse of rumination and we marinate in the stress soup for
days together. We certainly cannot go back to living in the caves, nor can we
wait for the slow process of evolution to save us from ourselves. Our best bet
is to be able to recognize the Sympathetic Nervous System activity and learn to
regulate it at will. That's exactly what we aim to teach in our training
programs and workshops.Â
