Workplaces and employers have not been totally absent from Victoria’s Royal Commission into Mental Health Systems’ Public Hearings and the Commissioners have asked about the workplace context several times but it sounds like they are asking the wrong people or not challenging enough. For instance, on Day One when Stigma was a theme, the Commission asked Dr Michelle Blanchard of SANE Australia:
The first week of media coverage of Victoria’s Royal Commission into Mental Health is very thin on the roles and impacts of workplaces and work activities on people’s mental health, but it is part of the conversation.
The Public Hearings on July 4-5 had Prevention and Early Intervention as their theme. Prevention as occupational health and safety (OHS) people would apply was mostly absent. Prevention, in OHS terms, is usually about the elimination of a risk or hazard whereas the impression from the discussion in the Royal Commission over the last few days is that mental health is something that appears, strikes an individual (with ripples to relatives), is treated and a new psychological normal, a functional/social normal is established. Analysis of the social, occupational and environmental precursors, elements that OHS investigations are obliged to consider, seems missing, at the moment.
According to the Commission’s transcript Chair Penny Armytage said on July 2, 2019:
“We start these hearings with a wide lens. Not in hospitals or clinics, but in our homes, our sporting fields and our workplaces.”
Public submissions for Victoria’s Royal Commission into Mental Health close on July 5 2019. If you believe that work-related mental health is important, tell the Royal Commission through its, very easy, online submission process. Below is the text of the submission I made earlier this week.
The website asks you questions, many more than I answered, so you just have to think a little bit, and comment. If you don’t have time for a detailed submission, there is a Brief Comments option.
What is already working well and what can be done better to prevent mental illness and to support people to get early treatment and support?
Employers have had legislative obligations to provide safe and healthy work environments for many decades, but the inclusion of psychological health has been largely overlooked in preference to those hazards that have a direct relationship to traumatic injury and death. It is only since 2000, and the various campaigns since to prevent and reduce stress and bullying, that psychological risks have been on the workplace agenda.
In this second of a series of articles on Burnout, SafetyAtWorkBlog went beyond its regular sources of mental health information and received some useful comments from international professionals in the mental health/burnout space. Courtney Bigony, Director of People Science at 15Five told SafetyAtWorkBlog:
Behind every call for Industrial Manslaughter laws in Australia over the last twenty years has been is a deeply grieving family. We often see relatives on the TV News, standing outside of Courts, or at memorial sites. SafetyAtWorkBlog fears for the mental health of these people who have usually been traumatised by the death and whose experiences in the immediate aftermath and the months afterwards often exacerbates that trauma.
But people have been killed at work for centuries and often the current pain and anger is so raw that we fail to remember those who have already gone through this process because their voices have often been used and discarded.
SafetyAtWorkBlog spoke with several bereaved relatives who have experienced the loss of a relative at work. The focus was on those whose relatives died over a decade ago, to gain a more measured and reflective perspective and in order to understand what may be in the future for all of us who have workers in our families. I responded more emotionally to these stories than I expected and have found it difficult to write about the issues I intended to address, so I have decided to let these interviews and stories stand pretty much by themselves.
The first of these responses is from Jan Carrick. Her 18-year-old son Anthony died in 1998 on his first day at work. One article written in 2003 about Anthony’s death and that of other young workers said this:
Continue reading ““They did not know what to say, so they stop saying anything at all””
The prominence of Burnout as an occupational health and safety (OHS) matter has gained renewed prominence since the World Health Organisation (WHO) recognised it as an “occupational phenomenon“. But WHO equally stressed that Burnout
“… is not classified as a medical condition.”
SafetyAtWorkBlog asked several OHS and workplace experts in Australia and overseas about how to prevent Burnout. Below is the first of a series of articles in which Australian OHS Regulators provide their take on the issue. The next part will look at some overseas and non-regulatory perspectives.
The National Australia Bank and the CSIRO have released their National Outlook Report for 2019. It should be no surprise that the only mention of occupational health and safety (OHS) in this report is in relation to “employee wellbeing” – reflecting the current corporate approach to OHS in Australia. The discussion on employee wellbeing in this report is selective and could have been stronger in its recommendations for change.