Berlin is a city of wonders. Going through its meticulously clean roads, one could easily be led to believe that a giant artist picked up the most beautiful ingredients coming from nature and classic and modern architecture and after a masterly mix spread them out skilfully in a unique blend that can sweep any visitor in a crest after crest of stupendous awe.
Earlier last month, the German Federal Ministry of Health and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs with the collaboration of the European Commission hosted a conference on mental health at the workplace in this unique city.
The aim of the conference was to raise awareness on this phenomenon that has been silently assailing the minds and lives of more than half of European citizens for a good number of years, while at the same time providing a platform to exchange and improve cooperation on the challenges and opportunities in workplace mental health and well-being.
This conference was the last of a series of five events organised around different themes of the European Pact for Mental Health and Well-being, launched in June 2008, with the aim of enabling exchange and cooperation between stakeholders in different sectors including health, employment and education on the challenges and opportunities in promoting better mental health.
For any human being living in a reasonably functioning society, work is a basic need as it gives the individual a sense of identity, achievement and satisfaction, attachment, stability, inclusion in the social network, structure in life and self-esteem, which are all strong mental health promoting factors.
It comes to as no wonder, as a result, that anything which shakes this framework for the individual also shakes his mental well-being and thus his efficient functioning in the close family network and in society at large.
Sadly, one in four EU citizens can expect to experience a mental health problem during their lifetimes; in fact, a Eurobarometer EU-wide survey in 2010 found that 15 per cent of adults seek help every year from mental health care professionals while seven per cent are prescribed antidepressants.
Additionally, stress, depression and anxiety-related disorders are the top three causes of illness in European workplaces. There are two main factors at the workplace that can affect the mental health of the individual – namely the type of environment in a particular workplace and the recent global changes that have revolutionalised our job industry in the last few years.
A poor working environment, especially if it is characterised with poor interpersonal relationships between workers and more so between workers and management, is thought to be a common cause of work-related stress. Increased pressure to work to tight deadlines, poor job satisfaction and blurred boundaries between home and work were also found to be oft- mentioned reasons why there has been a continued decrease in the number of employees who were happy with their working conditions over the past 20 years.
The recent global changes in the job industry, which has seen workplaces constantly changing and being restructured, was found to be another factor which is lowering the threshold for mental stress at work.
At least 20 per cent, and in some countries namely Sweden and Finland more than 50 per cent, of employees have experienced substantial restucturing or reorganisation at work in the last three years resulting in major layoffs and thus in having less people doing the same amount of work and with employees having different roles within the same workplace.
Naturally, increased mental stress at work can lead to poor performance, increased sick leave, early retirement and/or exclusion from work. Rates of employment for people with long-term mental health problems can be as low as 10 per cent compared with 60-70 per cent of the general EU population due to multiple barriers to both obtaining and maintaining employment.
There are also major costs to health and social welfare systems; the total costs of depression alone in the EEA were estimated to be €136.3 billion in 2007 where the majority of these costs (€99.3 billion) were found to have an impact on productivity. In Austria 29 per cent of all early retirement was due to mental-health problems in the same year while 40 per cent of long-term disability benefits in Great Britain were dissipated as a result of poor mental health.
Locally, we do not have data on the effects of mental stress due to the workplace on the quality of life of the citizens nor do we have any figures correlating mental health and absenteeism from work or early retirement.
The most plausible reason for this is probably the deep stigma surrounding mental conditions in general in all strata of society.
In fact in a speech given at the Richmond conference in January, Parliamentary Secretary for the Elderly and Community Care Mario Galea extrapolated on the fact that eight per cent of workers in the European Union suffer from depression to come up with a figure of approximately 12,300 workers suffering from depression locally.
The same EU research also showed that locally 29.3 per cent of workers suffer from depression, anxiety and stress, an alarmingly high figure when compared with the European average of 17.6 per cent.
Mr Galea believes that, as a result, the government should commit itself to tackle this issue in a number of ways. One of them would be increasing the investment in the public health promotion in this sector not just by the government but also by the social partners.
Another would be to instill a culture where employers not only give more importance to creating a healthier workplace, but also to have more awareness about mental health disorders in order to be better able to support workers with mental health difficulties.
Employers should also be encouraged to hold regular audits of its beaurocratic and organisational processes to make sure that there is adequate balance between the work done and the renumeration given and between work and social life. Finally, Mr Galea believes that more reform needs to be done in the social security framework so that social benefits do not hinder in any way reintegration in the working market.
In fact, a survey of 29, 000 employees in 15 countries worldwide found that organisations where health and well-being were perceived by employees to be well-managed had a level of performance more than 2.5 times greater than organisations where health and well-being were poorly managed.
Indeed, there is an economic rationale for improving partnership working between health and social security systems, the social partners, and occupational health services, individuals with lived experience of poor mental health, employers and employees to facilitate investment, mental health and well-being in the workplace.
More attention should also be given to increasing the opportunities and support for employment of people with existing mental health problems as aptly outlined by Richmond Foundation chief executive officer Doris Gauci.
One of the speakers at the conference shared a Chinese proverb that “words cannot cook rice”. Indeed they cannot. However, unfortunately, most legislators and people with the power to change situations find it easier to eat their rice uncooked rather than try to mitigate the situation at hand. Let us hope that the issue of mental health and its association with the workplace is not one of them.