Many people will experience mental health difficulties at some point in their lives. As people go through life the demands on them increase, and over a prolonged period these can cause difficulty and ill health. These problems can manifest themselves both in mental and physical ways.
What kind of demands do people experience? One of these can be work-related. People may experience stresses of looking for work, having to work in jobs which do not test their skills, or be involved in occupations which require skills that are seemingly difficult to develop. Another common theme with adults that causes stress is having to work in a job which increasingly demands more of them, but does not remunerate them accordingly. In other words, they have to work more for less, and have to accept the gradual lowering of work conditions, but are unable to change jobs because they have already invested so much in it in terms of working years, but cannot leave and start afresh because the demands of a mortgage to pay off and a young family to provide for means they cannot start on a lower rung in a new occupation. Over a prolonged period, this can cause severe unhappiness.
Is it surprising that suicide affects men in their thirties and forties? This is a period for a man where work demands more, the mortgage needs paying, and the family demands more of his time and energy. It is unsurprising that having spent long periods in this sort of daily struggle, that men develop mental health problems which lead some to attempt suicide. But mental health does not just affect men. Among some of the this some women have to deal with are the struggles of bringing up children, the work life balance, the unfulfilled feel of not utilising their skills, and feeling isolated.
One of the ways ill health develops mentally is when people spend too long being pushed too hard for too long. Put under these kind of demands, the body shuts down as a self preservation measure. But the demands on the person don’t just go away. You may want a break from work. But this may not be possible or practical. In fact, the lack of an escape when you are aware you need one may be a greater trigger of mental illness, because it increases the feeling of being trapped.
It is little wonder that when people go through periods of mental ill health, an enforced period of short-term rest will allow them to reset their bearings to be able to continue at work, or return to work with some level of appropriate support. But this is only temporary.
With mental ill health problems, lifestyle adjustments need to be made for sufficient recovery.
Under the Equality Act (2010), your employer has a legal duty to make “reasonable adjustments” to your work.
Mental ill health sufferers could ask about working flexibly, job sharing, or a quiet room, a government report suggests.
The practicality of this however means more cost to the employer in having to make adjustments to accommodate the employee, and unless the employee is a valued one, whom the employer would like to keep, often the case is that they will be gradually phased out of the organisation.
In fact, when an employee attains a certain level of experience within an organisation, employers often ask more of them because they know these employees are locked in to their jobs, and have to accept these grudgingly, or risk losing their jobs, which they cannot do if they have dependents and financial commitments.
And you know the irony of it? The mental ill health sufferer already knows that. Which is why they don’t speak out for help in the first place.
If these employees complain, employers simply replace them with younger employees, who cost less, and who are willing to take on more responsibilities just to have a job. Any responsibilities the redundant employee had simply get divided up between his leftover colleagues, who are in turn asked to take on more responsibilities. They are next in line in the mental health illness queue.
And what if you are self employed? And have to work to support yourself and your dependents? The demands of the day to day are huge and don’t seem to go away.
You can see why mental health is perceived a ticking time bomb. Organisations are not going to change to accommodate their employees because of cost, but keep pressing them to increase productivity without pay, knowing that they cannot say no, and when all the life and juice has been squeezed out of them, they can be chucked away and replaced with the next dispensable employee.
A ticking time bomb.