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Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

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Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#81

Post by wu-ikkyu »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #71
wu-ikkyu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. I am a proponent of taking time off for mental health, but I have to nitpick here. Medically speaking, physical illness is different from mental illness. One is diagnosed from objective scientific tests (pathology) while the other is not.

As a counterpoint, there are no objective scientific tests for, say, back pain or neck pain or nausea or menstrual cramps.

That is because pain is not a disease, it is a subjective experience (or symptom) generated by the nervous system.

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#82

Post by DanBC »

paulddraper wrote: post #78
calafrax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. Mental illness does not have to be severe just as physical illness does not have to be severe. Sick leave policies typically only require a doctors note/visit if you are absent for multiple days. Taking a single day off for mild mental illness, something like elevated stress levels causing anxiety that interrupts your sleep, seems perfectly…

> Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. I'm sympathetic, but don't make the discussion worse by throwing falsehoods like this around. Besides the fact expressed by others that physically illness is more diagnosable, you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.) Physical illness is a different situation. That's wh…

> You don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)

I tend to agree with you, but the concept of "contagion" is widely used in mental health settings. Self harm, or suicidality, can be "contagious".

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#83

Post by mistermann »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #63
mistermann wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how effective it is in persuasion, "shitty" is probably not an entirely accurate adjective.

Donald Trump memes were also very effective in persuasion for certain parts of the Internet this past presidential election.

You are correct.

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#85

Post by PeterisP »

calafrax wrote: post #8
steven777400 wrote: post #5

Great article. A few years ago (at a previous job) I took a sick day for "sanity", but told them I wasn't feeling well. I felt guilty about doing it. I think part of it is the association of sick leave with externally visible medical issues, and the corresponding "straightforward" medical verification. In other words, if you have a temperature or are vomiting, that's obvious. Many infections or physical injury can be…

Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. Mental illness does not have to be severe just as physical illness does not have to be severe. Sick leave policies typically only require a doctors note/visit if you are absent for multiple days. Taking a single day off for mild mental illness, something like elevated stress levels causing anxiety that interrupts your sleep, seems perfectly…

There are two major differences between mental diseases and typical physical diseases.

First, "sick days" generally are a policy for handling acute disorders; e.g. last week I didn't have disease X, today I do, and next week I'll be healthy again. You can't "wait out" a mental disease; taking a day or two off may reduce elevated stress levels but that is not the disease, the underlying problems aren't going to be solved when you come back.

The second issue is that many common physical issues are contagious, and there's a strong benefit for the employer and the society for sick people to "quarantine" themselves instead of going to offices and infecting coworkers and customers.

Mental diseases generally all are chronic and not contagious, and so they're similar in workplace (mis)treatment to things like arthritis or diabetes complications; things that don't map neatly to "x days to get cured" but instead need ongoing maintenance and unscheduled downtime forever.

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#86

Post by Spooky23 »

steven777400 wrote: post #5

Great article. A few years ago (at a previous job) I took a sick day for "sanity", but told them I wasn't feeling well. I felt guilty about doing it. I think part of it is the association of sick leave with externally visible medical issues, and the corresponding "straightforward" medical verification. In other words, if you have a temperature or are vomiting, that's obvious. Many infections or physical injury can be…

Basically they want to align sick leave with FMLA. It's not really evil.

The alternative is PTO, which is usually worse because sick leave gets mashed with vacation.

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #77
dragonwriter wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Medically speaking, physical illness is different from mental illness. One is diagnosed from objective scientific tests (pathology) while the other is not. Not all “physical” (the term is not really the correct distinction, since all illness, including mental illness, is physical) illness is diagnosed directly in that manner (not all physical illness can be, because not all is understood well enough to have definit…

>some psychiatric conditions have lab tests of the same sort available. Which ones? "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances

Schizophrenia had one on the market briefly, and there is one for bipolar disorder that is (or was, as of last year) in clinical trials.

See, e.g., http://www.thedailybeast.com/can-a-blood-test-diagnose-menta...

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#88

Post by danellis »

acuozzo wrote: post #58
zitterbewegung wrote: post #2

I applaud the author for destigmatizing mental health issues. More companies need to be like this. Its really hard for people to understand mental health issues because you have to take many optional classes to even get an idea of what they are. Also, many people throw around terms like psychopath / ADD(ADHD) and either diagnose themselves or others and that can lead to more stigma or even misunderstandings. I think…

> Also, many people throw around terms like psychopath / ADD(ADHD) I can't stand this because I suffer from a double whammy: true diagnosed comorbid ADHD and OCD which people assume means that I'm just really hyper and picky. Also, people nowadays tend to assume that I was self-diagnosed (I wasn't) which I find to be a rather disrespectful and demeaning assumption. Living with ADHD and OCD as a computer programmer is…

> Living with ADHD and OCD as a computer programmer is a daily struggle.

I've struggled with this for as long as I remember, but I didn't really understand what was wrong with me until I was diagnosed a couple of years ago after having a particularly difficult time.

I was as open with my manager about it as I felt I could be, and they gave the impression of being supportive. When I got a new manager, I laid it all out (which my therapist encouraged me to do), and explained how I was trying new medications and that some of them had negatively affected me. He said he understood and that he'd make sure I got the support I needed. When review time came, he said things hadn't been perfect, but he considered that to be because I hadn't received the appropriate support from my previous manager. Things improved: he made sure I was assigned longer-term work that didn't involve having to switch between tasks too often. Unfortunately, everything I'd done suddenly became irrelevant when they decided to reboot a project, invalidating nine months of work.

Then one day, out of the blue, just as I was getting into the restarted project, I was called into a Hangout and told that that would be my last day, with no formal explanation given, other than that they were suddenly no longer happy with the quality of my work. I was devastated. My son had just started at a private school (because of his own problems with ADHD), and I was due to lease a new car later that day. We ended up homeschooling him for the rest of the year.

What really gets to me, though, is that there was no process. The VP of People had given a talk not longer before about "How to get fired from ", and one of the key takeaways was that no one should be fired without knowing it was coming, but for some reason I was treated differently. And all this from a company that preaches "love" as a core value. I'm not naive: I understand that it's all about the bottom line, not caring about people, but this was a company that wanted us to believe it cared about things like mental health.

I've learned my lesson, though. In future, I'll keep personal things to myself, and just try to do my best. I've learned not to think of colleagues as friends, and I will never again fill out a self-assessment except in the blandest, most generic of terms.

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#89

Post by coldtea »

paulddraper wrote: post #78
calafrax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. Mental illness does not have to be severe just as physical illness does not have to be severe. Sick leave policies typically only require a doctors note/visit if you are absent for multiple days. Taking a single day off for mild mental illness, something like elevated stress levels causing anxiety that interrupts your sleep, seems perfectly…

> Medically speaking a mental illness is no different than a physical illness. I'm sympathetic, but don't make the discussion worse by throwing falsehoods like this around. Besides the fact expressed by others that physically illness is more diagnosable, you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.) Physical illness is a different situation. That's wh…

>you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)

You also don't get physically ill from being in proximity to someone with a non-contagious disease or a sprained ankle, so that's an irrelevant distinction.

Sick days are not just for flus and colds that are contagious...

Re: Mental health is still an issue in the workplace

#90

Post by maccard »

brudgers wrote: post #42
steven777400 wrote: post #5

Great article. A few years ago (at a previous job) I took a sick day for "sanity", but told them I wasn't feeling well. I felt guilty about doing it. I think part of it is the association of sick leave with externally visible medical issues, and the corresponding "straightforward" medical verification. In other words, if you have a temperature or are vomiting, that's obvious. Many infections or physical injury can be…

My beloved works in health care (currently with oncology patients, previously hospice and Alzheimer's). The idea of taking days off for mental health is pretty normal and well accepted within the industry. Then again, it's a culture where mental health is treated as a health issue and sucking it up for the dollar is recognized as unsustainable over the long term. Well that and even the bosses are ready to acknowledge…

Anecdotal, and on the opposite end of the spectrum, I've a friend who works in healthcare in the UK. Even though the official line is that they're not to come in to work while ill, not turning up ends up putting them under an incredible amount of pressure, and they have to justify every sick day to the post where even when she had some quite serious issues she was still working rather than face up to her management
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