Employers must spot signs of depression

Inaccurate Figures?

Have the CIPD thought about the stigma that is still firmly attached to mental health issues such as depression in the minds of many UK employers? There must be many more employees who take absences for these issues but, with the help of a friendly GP, manage to get it reported and logged as something less controversial.

I agree that employers need to be trained in spotting the signs, but in many cases their attitude probably needs a kick as well.

As an ex-personnel officer (and CIPD member) now working in IT abroad, I recall many cases, some in blue-chip companies, where employees with depression were viewed as "damaged goods" by management.

Speaking personally...

I spent a large part of last year on sick leave due to depression. Fortunately for myself, the company I work for has a good attitude towards the health of it's employees, not only allowing my the time, but phasing me back into work, and ultimately relocating me within the company to a role that better suited my mental health. On the other hand, I am fully aware (from my career history) that there are those employers that should depression be linked to time off, will try to find other reasons for "letting you go," and tend not to have any interest in keeping you well.

I still suffer from depression, and keep my manager and team leader appraised of any developments (mood swings etc), since I am aware that it's in both their interests and mine to ensure that I am fit for my role. Overall, the response that I I have had and still get from teh company makes me feel like a valued employee, which in turn alleviates some of the reasons for my depression in the first place. I suspect that should other companies take this approach, allowing time off without (visible) stigma, and with the employees consent monitoring the situation regularly, and still making the employee feel both wanted and needed in their role, the incidence of time off for depression would drop considerably.

Of course, both parties need to be one hundred percent honest in their approach to this, and someone suffering from severe depression may not even realise it before it becomes a serious issue, putting the symptoms down to overtiredness/overworking; this happens to me even though I was first diagnosed over 13 years ago. This being the case, and the stigma still being attached to depression as a "mental illness", it may be some considerable time before these figures actually drop...

Experience

With all this technological progress, the desire to be constantly connected; and a constant flow of information perpetuating every waking minute of our lives it is only going to make more and more people unwell with anxiety/panic attacks and depression.

When are companies going to realise that people are its very nuts and bolts that hold it all together; and are regularly the most vulnerable. We are not a metal chair, or a PC monitor; we do not have dependable predictable reactive tendencies; it is almost as though we are being pushed to see how far we can be legally taken.

So where are we all being taken? This incessant march towards technological utopia, blurring the lines between what is our 'free time' and 'work time'. "Let me just put down my book/meal/hobby a work email has come in that I just have to action". It is this very process of our conscious mind feeling it needs to have the communication channels open at all times that is the victory the technological juggernaut needs to feed itself and grow stronger.

Most of us would hardly bat an eyelid at the arrival of an email during a meal/break and that person replying; be it at lunch or dinner and yet the more you think about it; the more absurd it really is. When do we switch off this communication and class ourselves as 'technologically unavailable'?

The fundamental point that is being missed is as human beings we have physical and emotional limits. Modern society puts tremendous strains on our happiness, relationships and personal development. What we see in the media and electronic communication is ever increasingly difficult to shut out because it is pervading more and more of our lives. It is no wonder more relationships are failing, more people are spending longer at work to pay for all the things they think they need; and more people are becoming depressed because they cannot bear the weight of modern life.

Lets not forget this is before we even look at the person and their circumstances which may have also bought on depression. We are the losers in this situation, and we all know that money does not make us happy; and this is what this corporate march it is all about. So ultimately we are cheating ourselves, as individuals there are no winners and we have to ask the question...

Is it possible to become depressed by modern life?

What, are you joking, Nik?

Is it possible *not* to become depressed by modern life?

Of course, I've had depression for at least a decade, probably quite a lot longer but I can only produce diagnoses going back ten years, and right now I'm at a bit of a low point on the Wheel of Mood, so maybe I'm a little bit skewed in my perspective. But I've certainly found nothing in the modern world that helps to alleviate my depression, and plenty of things to make despair look perfectly reasonable, one of which is work.

Nik, you talk of the blurring between work time and free time, and of people answering emails and doing work in the middle of dinner, lunch, hobbies, you name it -- ever since I made the mistake of letting myself become important enough at this job for people to want to get hold of me out of hours, I've not *had* any such thing as 'free time'.

Not when all of our more obstreperous and irritating clients know I've always got half an eye on my email. Not when the closest I can get to taking a vacation is to switch venues and work from somewhere other than the office or home for a while, and pay for the privilege. Not when half the time my employer says don't take things too seriously because I'll burn myself out, but doesn't actually think to *do* anything about it -- like find somebody else who can handle most or all of the stuff that I do, and end up doing in the middle of the night, because somebody has to do it and I'm the only one who's been around long enough to know how. I'd *love* to teach this stuff to somebody else. Not when I've got an entire email account just to receive automated warnings that things have gone wrong, things whose fixes can't be similarly automated for one stupid reason or another. Not when I've even got my phone into the act -- some of the more significant warnings send me SMS messages, too, so my phone randomly beeps out at me and I have to look at it and do what it says. What the fuck is this, a B. F. Skinner experiment?

Now, I suppose I can't fairly say that my employer hasn't noticed any of this going on -- certainly they've noticed something is wrong, given that I started here as the Boy Wonder and I've turned into a bitter, mostly useless old shit in the space of three years. Mostly, I think, this is down to the year I've just recently spent doing all this stuff without *any* support -- we're a virtual hosting company with about two hundred active clients, sites in languages from PHP to Java to VB.NET to classic VB to Perl, most of it three and four years old and badly implemented to begin with -- which is to say most of it failing -- and how many programmers to support all this stuff? One! After that, is it any wonder I've slowly and quietly lost my shit in a way that even my boss couldn't help but notice?

And, yeah, like I said, the two people above me in the (very small) company have noticed that something's been going on. I can't fault them on that basis. I do have to say, though, that the method in which they've chosen to deal with it leaves everything to be desired: as far as I an determine, what's going on right now (now that we've finally managed to hire somebody who can write some worthwhile code, that is) is that things are being subtly rearranged so that I'm right out on the edge of the company rather than smack in the middle. I'm being asked to document things, keep written track of passwords, and I haven't done any actual new work in months -- all the better to painlessly kick me loose when the (arbitrarily defined) time comes. Well, painlessly to the company, anyway.

I guess this is the way they repay the loyalty of mine which I've heard extolled at every single review I've ever had here, even including the most recent one, at which I heard that the boss was "beginning to lose confidence in me" -- well I shouldn't fucking wonder, should I? I lost confidence a long time ago that this company had any more interest in me than whatever they can get before I fail so thoroughly I have to be replaced.

And it's not as though anyone's ever asked me about any of this -- well, I can't say that. But it's not as though anyone's ever asked me about any of this, with any intention of listening seriously to what I had to say unless it suited what had already been decided. Every time I was asked what would help, I said 'hire another programmer'. Hire another programmer, hire another programmer -- hell, hire another half-bright asshole like me, who just learned it for fun and who gets it right more often than not. It is not as though I am some kind of precious and irreplaceable fucking jewel -- if I were anything like that, I'd probably have been able to hack four years of college and get a fucking degree, but I couldn't manage that either, could I?

But, no, that couldn't happen. Well -- again, I can't say that's entirely true. We've finally managed to hire someone else who knows his way around PHP, which takes a goodly amount of the load off my shoulders -- except, of course, that all the new work (what new work? you ask, the new work we don't have enough people to do right, just like all the old work, I answer) is going to the new guy, who's obviously got plenty of time to do it in, while I get to do the same old shit *and* somehow magically either do the parts of the new work that require domain-specific knowledge that only I have, or transfer all that domain knowledge to the new guy -- without taking any time about it! God forfend we take enough fucking time to do a job right just once before we all die and rot away to dust!

I mean, yeah, I'm loyal. I guess I ought to be -- this is the field I want to spend my life working in, but I couldn't manage to attain a minimum level of documented competence, so if I don't get a lucky shot into the industry, get some work experience so I can show somebody that I'm not just J. Random Fuck-for-brains in off the street, I'm basically gonna be doing crap day jobs for the rest of my life and just playing with computers in my off hours, and maybe if I'm very lucky getting to be insulted by shit-for-brains corporate IT helpdesk fuckoffs who can't do a quarter of what I can. This guy gave me my shot, or so I believed at the time -- yeah, I'm gonna be loyal! And this is what it earns me? Not just being the only one who can fix stuff for a year -- but, just when things finally start to look like taking a turn for the better, now I'm being eased out? I'm sorry, are you *trying* to give me the idea that I'd be better off as a plumber or something?

And you know what the best part is? Like I said, I have depression, and have had for a decade or more. Like any chronic disease, it gets better sometimes and worse sometimes -- and, like any chronic disease, it can be either eased or exacerbated by circumstances.

When I started this job three years ago, I had no trouble at all dealing with my depression just under my own power, without any need for personality-destroying medication or utterly pointless therapy -- show me a 'therapist' who has any fucking idea what he or she is talking about, I'll show you a handful of hen's teeth, and no talking cure is going to fix a broken situation anyway -- in the last six months, I've been to one counselor, am off-and-on looking for another, and I'm seriously considering taking advantage of the excellent psychiatric medication benefit provided by my wife's employer's HMO. (They're more than happy to drug you, if it'll get your broken ass back to work!)

And what's my boss doing about it? Getting ready to ease me out! Don't fucking tell me that the problem would be solved if employers would just do more to *notice* the signs of depression or other mental illness. That would help -- but not enough, because the problem is not just that sometimes they don't notice, it's that they don't give a shit when they do. Fix *that* and maybe you'll be on to something.

Both approaches described here !

Under "speaking personally" we see how it should be done - I had always wondered if there actually was any employer really doing that.

Under "What, are you joking, Nik?" we see the more normal approach, and close to the one I'm unfortunately familiar with.

When my last job finally got too much, having raised all the issues and had them ignored for years, the response was to get rid of me. I'd been feeling lousy for a while but couldn't figure out what the problem was - but then someone showed me a leaflet from their union about stress. There was a list of causes - and I could tick nearly all of them. I could tick most of the symptoms on the list as well - and that's when the penny dropped.

One day I just decided I'd had enough, managed to get an appointment with the doctor after work, left at normal finishing time and never went back. I knew it wasn't going to be "a day or two off and back to normal" and I expected to have to work hard to persuade the doc to sign me off. I guess it shows how bad it was as I'd only got a few words out before he reached for the pad !

We had a meeting, myself accompanied by union support ,and my director and the 'hr manager' from the company. It became painfully clear from the moment each of the company people opened their mouths that the plan was to make me believe that I was totally useless, did nothing, and it was all my fault ! A very simple plan, make the already stressed out employee believe it's his own fault so he'll quit without taking them to the cleaners. At no point, either during this meeting or in the various discussion prior to me going on sick leave, was there any dicussion that could even remotely be described as designed to deal with the issues.

I'd obviously done too many jobs too well - the network didn't break down all the time, email 'just worked', the phones did what they were supposed to, and so on (you know, all those things that don't happen on their own but which are invisible if they aren't broken). My director, new to the company and clearly brought in on his abilities as a hatchet man, looked me straight in the face and said "I've asked around and as far as I can see, you don't do anything" - not the sort of words you forget in a hurry ! Until then I'd genuinely wanted to deal with the problems and get back to work, but there's clearly no way anyone could go back to a job where management have that sort of attitude. It was the company that offered a compromise agreement with a financial value that didn't even reach up to 'insult' on the pittance scale, and my union chap talked them up to 'cheap' - I still wish I'd held out for more, but when you get to that stage you just want the pain to end.

I know, and work with, people who really can't see the value of a union. I'd been in my union for many years and sometimes wondered if it was worth it, but their support during all this was worth every penny I'd ever paid - and some. Good friends and family are essential too. Without that support I really can't be certain that I'd still be around to tell the story, things really did get that low at times.

Stress, and the effects it causes, is one of those things that you dismiss - we all know of suggestions that people should just pull their act together and other suggestions that it's all some minor ailment that people can just deal with. I used to think that as well, you know, the "it's just people wanting to slack" sort of attitude. I don't think it is something that you can understand until you've experienced it, and I can assure everyone, that's not something to aspire to !

RE: the reply to Nik above

The anonymous poster mentions workign for a vwery small company, and effectively being abused, by giving their personbal time over to work time.

Two obvious options to regain perspective:

1. Switch off mobile devices

2. Threaten to quit

If 1 doesn't work it's your fault. If 2 doesn't work, I'd be shocked - sounds liek they need you more than you need them

MikeC