OH’s leadership key to tackling mental health post pandemic – Personnel Today

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The scale of the mental health challenge facing employers as ‘normality’ hopefully returns  means occupational health needs to grab the reins and provide leadership to join up mental health support, argues Dr Tarun Gupta.

Anxiety levels about office returns, commuting or even the continuation of working from home are reportedly high as workplaces and society continue to open up. This is evidenced by the influx of seemingly new ‘conditions’ such as ‘Coronaphobia’ or ‘Covid-19 anxiety syndrome’.

The question is, how should organisations respond? The answer is, not in a knee-jerk – stick a plaster over it – kind of way.

Instead, employers need to take a long-term strategic view. This involves getting much better at equipping their people to take care of their own personal health and happiness needs while, at the same time, better managing and mitigating the underlying risk factors.

This is going to require boundaryless (in other words multidisciplinary and cross-organisational) collaboration – and occupational health (OH) has a key role to play.

On the one hand, it’s important not to medicalise perfectly normal responses to circumstances. In other words, over-medicalise normal anxiety related to the pandemic and reintegration back into daily life.

On the other, where such issues are leading to absence and presenteeism or maybe even contributing towards work-related stress (because, let’s face it, putting your finger on one stressor can often be difficult), there is an onus on employers to do something.

These issues are distinct from formal mental illness, such as clinical depression or generalised anxiety disorder, which require diagnosis and