Preventing mental health problems is better than curing them

So you’re sitting at work, sipping your first cup of anxiety of the day. (Let’s ignore for now where you got it from: an ambivalent boss, diffident colleagues, status worries, job insecurity, imminent change – the possibilities are endless.)

Do you a) ignore it and plough on; b) plan a huge night out to drown your sorrows; or c) log on to your desktop chatbot/wellbeing app/mindgym to do a little therapy-lite?

Even a year ago the third option would have been fanciful. But now there is such a proliferation of tools that it can be hard to know where to start. (Answer: Mind’s Mental Health at Work is a safe, neutral option.)

Business is finally waking up to the importance of mental health, and not before time. Latest research warns that mental illness will cost the global economy £12tn by 2030. (If, like me, you are struggling to comprehend that figure, it’s over £24,000a second.)

At a London conference this week, timed to coincide with World Mental Health day, big names were queuing up to reveal what they were doing to give staff relief, advice and digital intervention when things went wrong.

Retailers, big tech, consultancies, banks and manufacturers were all proud about the in-house apps they have created to nip trouble in the bud. PepsiCo even said its tools were having a remarkable effect in clearing up mild depression within its workforce.

Meanwhile, the number of startups jostling for attention with psychometric tools, stress heatmaps and wellness gamification modules is almost disconcerting: Wraw, Unmind, Unicorn, StressFactor, Psyt – and that was just at one conference in one half-hour pitching session, from the second half of the alphabet.

These tools, dashboards, resilience monitors and unified wellbeing apps are all very well and will serve a purpose. But, alas, too many are designed for dealing with staff who are already in the danger zone. The whole point of addressing the mental illness epidemic now is to deal with people when they are well.

We are obsessive about encouraging healthy lifestyles for physical wellbeing and need to map this across into the mental sphere. We all have mental health, and business needs to focus on how to maintain it. It’s not just about the one in four who have succumbed – it’s about the three in four who might.

Unfortunately, businesses are a bit like people: they only really like to scramble into action after crisis strikes, when it’s already too late. The return on investment from proactive mental health programmes and employee wellbeing is hard to argue when lined up against other needs that appear more immediate, quantitative and urgent.

And yet our breakneck business world must take some of the responsibility for our mental health predicament. Job insecurity, the gig economy, perma-change, ever higher shareholder expectations, over-large organisations, 24/7 working, atomised industrial and post-industrial processes, disenfranchised staff (apparently more than 80% of UK employees feel disengaged from their company’s core purpose): is it any wonder that many of us are mentally shot?

So how about this: alongside the requirement to publish financial results and profit warnings – and the new duty to report back on gender pay – why not require big companies to report how many days they lose to stress-related sickness each year? And how long it took each worker to get back to work. And how many were able to resume their previous tasks.

The shame of doing so might prompt a few more businesses into proactive action, rather than reactive chatbots. - The Guardian, UK