Mental Health First Aid England's Simon Blake highlights how businesses can demonstrate their commitment to employee wellbeing.
14 May 2019, 3 min read
This week is Mental Health Awareness Week. We owe a debt of gratitude to the Mental Health Foundation for creating this week in 2001. I am sure those who initiated it could only dream the level of activity and awareness that it would generate.
And it is a good job the week does exist because our recent poll of over 2,000 employees shows just how much work needs to be done to ensure equality between mental and physical health.
- 9 out of 10 employees would not talk about self-harm or eating disorders
- Employees find it easier to talk about diarrhoea than depression
- Employees find it three times easier to talk about physical ailments than mental ill health.
This is not new. We have known for a long time that stigma and fear of judgement impacts people’s ability to talk about mental health at work. The economic and human cost of this is stark.
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