Employers must pay attention to mental illness

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.

In some ways, the pain from the heart attack is visible to third parties while that for depression is mostly invisible. This is what leads to isolation and a sense of dejection and suicide.

Biological, not social

A depressed person feels ill-understood by family and this applies to the employer as well. The lay person is confused by the fact that a person without any real problems still gets depressed.

To the lay person, having social problems is the route to developing depression. This is completely false because Major Depressive disorder or what used to be called endogenous depression comes “from the blue” and is biological rather than social in origin.

If this answer teaches you nothing today, let it be the fact that the absence of a cause you can see does not rule out depression.

It is, therefore, possible that you missed the depression in this case because you were looking for a cause for it. Indeed it is the absence of an obvious cause that makes the depressed person so desperate and potentially suicidal.

Formal system

She would have been reasoning that with such a good husband, job, family and future, she had no reason to feel so hopeless, but that is exactly how she felt: hopeless, useless and a burden to her family and friends.

Your efforts to reach out to her were unsuccessful because you lacked a formal system of helping your staff. There are a number of self assessment tools online for depression and other mental disorders.

In your new job, you have a chance of practising as a 21st century HR expert where your role will include making sure that through a healthy workforce, the company is able to deliver high quality services that ensure that the shareholder remains happy.

Over the years we have worked with many companies to help them put in place screening strategies for depression.

In this century of increasing lifestyle diseases, it is more important than before that such programmes should include the entire spectrum of diseases such as diabetes and hypertension which lead to major losses to the economy.

Sad as you must feel about having lost the employee, you now have a second lease of life in which you can save many lives.

Good luck in your new job.