About employee depression

According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, at any time, 10% of the working population suffers from depression.

Out of 1000 employees 100 suffer from depression, 25 are diagnosed and 6 are actually properly treated. That is 6%!

There are clear links between depression, job strain, stress, cardiovascular disease (the leading cause of death in the world), productivity, employee turnover, etc.

Job strain and stress are generally related with management quality.

Mental health at work is a critical issue since it can easily become life threatening.

There are many solutions to detect mental problems at work but too few service firms treat it as a symptom of a sick organism.

My opinion is that mental disease at work should be understood holistically and treated systematically in order to avoid stigmatizing even more the sick persons, whose only fault usually is that they work in a poorly managed environment and have no social support.

This is not necessarily the enterprise's managers fault. There are synergistic factors that feed the conditions for high job strain. A junior project manager, an angry or very demanding client, errors in the job definition, errors in project scheduling or useless procedures that slow the work process are simple examples that have great impact on team's morale.

Usually a well understood problem has the simplest and the most elegant solution.

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Octavian Mihai