COULD A SIMPLE-TO-USE, ANONYMOUS, TEXT SERVICE HELP TO TACKLE THE MENTAL HEALTH EPIDEMIC? WE THINK IT COULD. SO WE CREATED ONE.

You know the background, by now – mental health issues cost UK employers a staggering amount of money every year.

Until recently, it was a hidden cost, because mental health problems are harder to diagnose than the accidents and physical ill-health which they usually leave in their wake.??

No one yet knows what the pandemic has done to this – there are some counter-intuitive suggestions that it might have temporarily improved the situation (perhaps because people have spent less time in the workplace).?I’m not sure about that, personally.??

But even if it has, as we try to find our way back to a healthy economy, common sense says that we’re facing a major mental health challenge in the UK’s workforce.

If you know the facts, skip the next few paragraphs.?If you’ve somehow missed them (how on earth did you manage that?), here’s a tiny taste:

The year before the pandemic – 2019/20 – 38.8 million working days in the UK were lost due to work related ill-health and non-fatal workplace injuries.

These weren’t people who caught flu, had measles, or fell off their mountain bikes.?These were people who were made sick, or were injured, in their workplace.

A fag packet calculation says the cost of that to British industry is ￡un*%$+ing believable.

As we try to get the economy back on track, none of us can afford that.

You can argue the point in terms of specific figures – there are multiple studies, all calculated in slightly different ways, and the websites of organisations like Mates in Mind, the Samaritans, the Office of National Statistics, and many others, carry bucketloads of them.?

All credible, all based on data.?

There are some seemingly conflicting stats, as always in these situations, but the conflicts are minor, and within statistical norms, and the figures are universally huge.??

I’m not talking about the cost of sickness and absence - merely the cost of sickness and absence caused by something that happened to them at work. Paying people, essentially, to recover, from what happened during working hours.

A common theme underlying all of this is mental health.

There seems to be a consensus amongst mental health professionals that one in six in the workforce have some kind of mental health issue right now, and one in four will do so in the course of the year.

That means people who are in turmoil of some sort, and who may be finding it difficult or impossible to apply focus, concentration and diligence.?You see the results of that in low productivity, presenteeism, and accidents.

This isn’t about blame – only in the last few years have business leaders really woken up to this, and there’s an increasing momentum to stem the cost. Both the human cost, and the financial one.

At Xmo Strata we must have had some awareness of it in 2011, because we introduced a service which offered employees 24/7 counselling, but even we’ve only really cottoned-on to the scale of the problem in more recent years.

We’re now active in Mates in Mind, we have in-house Mental Health First Aiders, and we’re making employees aware of the issue and helping to spot colleagues who need help.

And there lies the nub.

Identifying the problem, and getting an employee to seek help, before an accident occurs (or, at worst, they kill themselves, on purpose; or someone else, by accident and lack of attention).

Stigma is the major obstacle. Men, in particular, find mental illness embarrassing.?This is illogical, and irrational, and embarrassment should be an entirely redundant emotion, but mental health hides in the workplace and uses stigma as its cloak of anonymity.?

The workplace banter surrounding the issue includes unhelpful language which reinforces the stigma, probably as a way of dealing with the discomfort that some would otherwise have when talking about it at all.??

People think that seeking help will impede their promotion prospects, endanger their job, and make colleagues respect them less.?

They sometimes consider themselves to be ‘weak’ and there’s a common theme about ‘letting people down’ – family, employer, colleagues, friends etc.?

The brain is an organ, like a lung, liver or heart.?If something goes wrong, it needs to be addressed, or in most cases, it will simply get worse.

But the treatment usually involves ‘talking therapies’, or at very least, involves talking during a diagnosis.?

Refusing to face the problem, or even acknowledge it, impedes effective treatment.

For that reason, confidentiality is important, but achieving and sustaining it is difficult.?

If you contact the Samaritans on the web, Google knows, because Google knows everything.?

If you call them, there’s a record on your call log, and possibly on an itemised bill.

It might seem a small thing, but to someone in mental distress small things get completely out of proportion.?

That’s the nature of mental illness.

(I’m not being critical of The Samaritans, by the way. In my view they've been instrumental in leading all of us to a greater awareness of these issues, and historically have done more than most to tackle them. The anonymity issues highlighted here apply to any organisation inviting contact via the web or a smartphone.)?

At Xmo Strata we’re a tech-led company, and we have people on the team who are tech experts, can write their own code, and who’ve developed some advanced project software to enhance our quality and safety systems, compliance, delivery and productivity.

So we set them a challenge.

We had the Mental Health First Aiders, but (just like The Samaritans), when contacting them, anonymity was impossible.?

In a company our size, people will often recognise each other’s voices.?Some people aren’t keen on phone calls/voice anyway, and prefer text, but that presents its own challenges in terms of anonymity.

It’s taken a while, but we have a solution.??

We now have a totally anonymous, text-based service connecting any employee, with a Mental Health First Aider.?

There are dedicated platforms for common problems (infant death, cancer etc) but it’s a broader service than that.

I won’t blind you with technobabble but it’s a ‘web app’ using encrypted code which is entirely untraceable.?

Even if you use your work phone there’ll be no record of the service you accessed, no phone numbers, web addresses, or other records.

Of course, that’s only half the problem.?The real issue is that there shouldn’t be a stigma at all.?

So (like many others) we have a long-term, sustained campaign on social media and elsewhere aimed at tackling this, and normalising the discussion over mental health.

None of this is a 'solution'.?

There’s no simple solution for mental health issues.

It’s a contribution to a process that must be as relentless as the problem itself.

It facilitates those who’ve been professionally trained to help.

We hope it will help to prevent suicide, and assist people having wretched lives to reach a better place.??

But if, as a manager, that’s not enough for you, we also believe it will help to make our office, warehouse and sites safer, more productive, and less costly.

• As many people will have seen, a week ago we were honoured to be awarded a highly prized Supplier Excellence award by Vinci FM in recognition of the many mental health initiatives that we've worked on with our employees over the last year. It seems appropriate, given the topic of this article, to once again thank the Vinci team for supporting us, and continuing to work with us to raise the bar further.

Let's keep in touch through this very tough period!

Xmo?Strata's LinkedIn page (sign installation and maintenance) is?here .

The?SpectisGB?LinkedIn page (scanning and digital reconstruction) is?here .

You can check out my other articles?here .?

Please visit?my?profile ?and send me a connection request if we have things in common ... and stay safe!