Please don’t waste managers’ time with mental illness training
July 12, 2024
Managers do not need mental illness training. It is irrelevant. They have enough on their plate already. Let me explain……
Yes, a manager has responsibilities regarding the mental health or ill-health of their workers. The key ones are:
- to provide a mentally healthy and psychologically safe workplace
- to check in with their staff and ensure staff feel they can reach out to the manager about mental ill-health if they need to
- proactively provide support, including reasonable adjustments, if the person indicates their mental ill-health is negatively impacting on an aspect/s of their job
- ensure the employee is not harassed, discriminated against or the recipient of adverse action as a result of their mental ill-health.
- Maintain the employee’s privacy
- Assess and respond to indications of risk to the person as a result of their mental ill-health, e.g., risk of self-harm or risk of psychological injury as a result of workplace exposures.
A manager does not need to know if the person has a diagnosed mental illness to fulfil these responsibilities. Their staff member’s words and actions that illustrate their distress and work impact is sufficient.
Knowing a diagnosis of a mental illness is irrelevant because it does not enhance a manager’s understanding of what to do. What matters is how the person’s thinking, feeling, and acting impacts them and their work.
Focusing training on defining and explaining mental illnesses and the criteria required to meet these diagnoses sends a confusing and contradictory message to managers given their role is to NOT diagnose.
This is part of the problem with mental health training today. Too often organisations are purchasing off-the-shelf training programs that are not fit for purpose.
Many of these programs don’t focus on the practical and specific needs of their audience. Instead, they provide content that is at times unnecessary, confusing and contradictory, which undermines it achieving its purpose. In particular, many training programs fail to clearly explain the differences between mental health, ill-health and illness. Mental illness is a subset of ill-health and its specifics takes the focus away from what is most important for the workplace.
Mental health training should be designed to give the participants what they need based on their role, organisation and industry. Without tailoring to participants’ roles and circumstances, the training can, at best waste participants time with irrelevancies and at worst, create a disincentive for people to take their responsibilities in this area seriously.
A quality training program on the topic of mental health must make participants roles at work vis-à-vis mental health and ill-health explicit, and take participants through real and relevant scenarios with practical advice on how to manage them. Most importantly it must build the participants’ knowledge and skills specifically in the areas that will allow them to meaningfully make a difference to their own and other’s level of mental health at work and to a mentally healthy workplace.
