Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.
Daniela Leo has faced generalized anxiety for as long as she can remember. But while the 24-year-old Torontonian noted that she has come a long way in her mental health journey, her recent job as an insolvency counsellor brought her anxiety once again to the surface.
“I felt a shift in my performance and those feelings of anxiety would come up,” Ms. Leo says.
She likened the position to working in customer service, as she largely spent her work days on the phone with clients who were confrontational. “I just wasn’t prepared for it, especially as someone who has trouble regulating their emotions when under stress,” she says.
Ms. Leo’s anxiety on the job reached a point where she decided to speak to her manager as well as HR about receiving support and potential accommodations. Eventually, though, she decided the best option for her mental health was to leave the job.
“There’s a huge disconnect between the needs of workers with mental health disabilities and managers not knowing what to do when employees tell them they have a mental health struggle and they need help,” says Katharine Coons, national associate director of workplace mental health at the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA).
With campaigns such as Bell Let’s Talk and flexible work arrangements emerging out of the pandemic, employees are increasingly realizing the value of mental health accommodations. Yet, according to the latest research from the Mental Health Commission of Canada, only 23 per cent of disabled workers in Canada are comfortable enough to discuss mental health with their employer.
Ms. Coons chalks it up to both a lack of training and the potential for stigma, both of which can feed into workers not feeling supported in the workplace. “We’re hearing more and more from organizations that say they lack the skills to accommodate mental health in the workplace. They’re scared they will say the wrong thing so they say nothing at all.”
She says “it starts to affect the organization’s culture,” leading to issues of employee recruitment, retention and morale.” The way we talk about mental health has a huge impact.”
Employers feel ‘ill-equipped’
In Ms. Coons’ experience, employers often feel ill-equipped to manage issues of mental health in the workplace.
Olivia Cicchini, from the HR consulting firm Peninsula Canada, notes that the struggle to accommodate mental health disabilities has emerged as a prevalent issue on Peninsula’s employer resource line.
“The topic of workplace accommodation as it applies to mental health has been increasingly gaining traction since the pandemic, where many employees suffered from issues such as social isolation, anxiety and depression,” Ms. Cicchini says.
Lack of managerial support
When Ms. Leo’s anxiety flared up on the job, she opened up to her manager about some of her mental health struggles.
“I had this understanding that I could rely on my boss for support and I confided with her about my struggles with anxiety and the challenges I can face in the workplace because of my mental health,” she says.
At first, Ms. Leo says, her manager was supportive. However, over time she felt less supported.
Ms. Cicchini says if managers struggle to support an employee it is often because of a lack of awareness.
“For some (employers), it can be hard to understand that someone with a mental illness can still have days in which they are, or appear to be, in good mental health,” she says. “This may cause employers to see the employee as faking their illness, when it is not the case. In turn, this perceived inconsistency can cause an employee’s accommodation to be denied or treated less seriously than an accommodation request for an illness that is physically noticeable.”
Denials of accommodations
As a result of these perceptions, Ms. Cicchini notes, mental health accommodations are also more likely to be denied.
In Ms. Leo’s case, she requested accommodations such as a reduced workload and flexible hours to help her offset the anxiety she was feeling at work, but her request was rejected. “Everything just escalated when I struggled to get accommodations.”
But Ms. Coons points out that the mentality that accommodations are invasive to the workplace is a misconception. “A lot of mental health accommodations don’t have to be very disruptive to the workplace.”
Ms. Coons cites “flexible scheduling, ability to control where and when they do their work, more time to train and modifying job duties,” as reasonable accommodations to support workers with mental health disabilities.
Normalize mental health in the workplace
Training and awareness are the first lines of defence, says Ms. Coons, who notes that it comes down to “recognizing we all have mental health challenges, normalizing that and destigmatizing that in the workplace.
Ms. Cicchini adds the need for measures such as “providing access to an Employee Assistance Program, allowing flexibility to balance work and home life, and awarding additional mental health days, which can all go a long way to cultivating a culture of acceptance and understanding.”
Reducing the stigma comes down to bringing mental health out in the open, which is why the CMHA and other organizations are prioritizing “giving [employers] the tools they need to have these conversations,” Ms. Coons says. “There’s been a big shift toward upskilling managers to have those conversations and to accommodate mental health. First and foremost is listening to your employees. It really comes down to having an open dialogue.”
Opening up about mental health is something that Ms. Leo struggled with, as she notes that she didn’t want to “be labelled as ‘the one with mental health issues’ and that’s all anyone would see [her] as.”
However, with time and therapy, she says she grew comfortable with having that open dialogue. “I think it’s more important to be upfront and honest about how you work best and what you need from your workplace,” Ms. Leo says. “You’re expected to check off so many boxes when applying to jobs, the least we can do is advocate for some rights of our own.”
