Employers must pay attention to mental illness

A depressed person feels ill-understood by family and this applies to the employer as well. PHOTO | FILE 

By DR FRANK NJENGA

In Summary

• It is the absence of an obvious cause that makes the depressed person so desperate and potentially suicidal.

I am an HR practitioner who just joined a new firm after almost five years of service with my previous employer. My exit was full of hidden pain because I witnessed a promising employee waste away due to what I suspected to be extreme depression.

As an HR manager I tried reaching out to her but my efforts came too late because she committed suicide. Should there be screening for mental illness at work?

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You have asked many questions in what seems to be one.

Though not explicit in your question, it is possible that your exit from your previous job could be related to the death of the member of staff under your watch. If that be the case, then your distress is understandable.

You tell us that you had “hidden pain” during this time. When did this pain start? Was it as you watched the woman “waste away”? Or was it after she died? The difference is not academic and might be crucial in the way you will manage your new job.

If, for example, the hidden pain was due to the work environment and that you had over the months tried to change the company to be more worker-friendly, then the pain might be different from when policies are right but failure was yours.

In the latter case you have only yourself to blame for failing to recognise on time that the worker was depressed. It might be that you are now feeling sad and possibly depressed yourself for the inadequacy.

Many Kenyan companies have established programmes for the early detection of all manner of psychological and emotional problems at the work place.

Others have advanced peer support systems that ensure the early detection of problems, thus improving productivity in the process.

Mental health experts the world over recommend such systems as part of the modern ways of managing business.

It is part of the modern day practices that require that HR practitioners to be armed with the knowledge to lead such a team.

The old fashioned HR practitioners still hold that depression is a self inflicted condition of weaklings who must be forced to shape up and “get on with it”.

Such HR departments keep sending “to show cause” letters to depressed employees instead of taking them for medical care. It is this type of practice that leads to suicide.

The depressed person is already in enough pain without repeated letters from HR. Some years ago a doctor who had suffered both a heart attack and depression (at different times) pointed out that the pain from depression was much greater than that from the heart attack.