New TUC report on mental health in the workplace

The prevalence of mental health problems among Britain’s workers is being exacerbated by reductions in the funding of mental health services, the TUC has warned. It added that official statistics “confirm a clear link with conditions such as stress generated at work that lead to mental ill health, just as other surveys have reported a rise in the incidence of stress at work.”

Writing in the Touchstone blog, TUC’s Peter Purton noted: “Evidently, just having a job – as politicians tell us – is not necessarily good for mental health: it’s necessary to be able to add the ‘good’ in front of the ‘job’ to achieve that outcome.” Click here to read the blog.

But he does say there is some good news, and that comes in the form of trade union initiatives to prevent work-related mental health problems or to support affected workers in their jobs. The TUC equal rights policy officer wrote: “A seminar the TUC held in February 2015 heard six case studies from unions working in various sectors where successful projects had been negotiated with employers who had been convinced of the value of creating mentally healthy workplaces, or at least to have established policies and procedures that meant that someone with a mental health problem was not automatically driven into the arms of an increasingly oppressive benefits regime where other research confirms that people with mental health issues are the most likely to lose benefits through sanctioning (for actions directly related to their health condition).” 

He points out that ‘Good practice in workplace mental health’, a TUC report that came out of the seminar, “provides examples of approaches that have been shown to work and that unions can build on and adapt to their own workplaces, preferably persuading the employer of the benefits to everyone of adopting a mentally healthy workplace approach.” Click here to read the report

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