It was eight years before Anthony O’Reardon spoke publicly about the mental health struggles that afflicted him back in 2010, but, once he started, he says with a laugh now, “I couldn’t seem to stop again”.
Then a driver with Dublin Bus, now with Irish Rail, O’Reardon reckons financial worries were the biggest factor affecting his health at the time. He suddenly started finding himself overwhelmed and thinking about suicide. “I didn’t realise what was going on at the time, although I did make one appointment with my GP and then a counsellor.
“I bottled the GP appointment that morning, though. I was thinking about the stigma of it all: ‘How can I talk to the family doctor about all of this?’ But then I hit on the idea of writing the doctor a letter. I think that was the start of things turning around for me. I’d reached out for help and that was sort of half the battle.”
Setting down all he was going through certainly helped him, he believes, but O’Reardon’s finances also started to improve and, as other external factors contributed, he began to feel much better over time.
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Eight years later, though, he was helping to organise a Pieta House, Darkness Into Light event in Sandymount and started to recount his experience to a group when, suddenly, he began to appreciate the impact it had all had on him.
Wanting to explore the issue more, he went back to UCC, and then Trinity, to study and became an ambassador for Shine, originally the Schizophrenia Association, one of a number of Irish charities with a focus on supporting people with mental health issues and their families.
O’Reardon now delivers the group’s six-point programme on workplace mental health to business leaders and their employees.
As it happens, work for him was always a positive. “There’s not too much daydreaming you can do driving a bus and I always enjoyed it, the focus was good for me”, but he is keenly aware workplace stress is a factor that contributes to so many others feeling unwell.
The World Health Organisation, which estimates 15 per cent of adults had a mental health issue in 2019, suggests all sorts of issues can cause stress that leads to other problems, from under- or over-work, bullying, poor or unsafe conditions or conflicts between the demands of work and home ... the list goes on.
The training is particularly focused on ensuring people are able to raise issues without feeling there is a stigma attached, as well as the creation of psychologically safe workplace environment.
“Psychological safety is about feeling comfortable enough to talk openly in the workplace, or anywhere I suppose, and not just about your mental health, but about anything,” he says. “It could be owning up to mistakes or having questions for people. There’s big research behind this and how important it is for people.”
It is important for the organisations that employ those people too. O’Reardon cites research that found 50 per cent of managers said absence from work due to stress, depression and related conditions has increased in recent years.
In fact, the scale of the increase is remarkable. Various Irish studies have highlighted the issue, but, in the UK, the most recent figures for the NHS, which employs 1.5 million people, suggest 25 per cent of all working days lost to illness are down to mental health conditions, roughly twice as many as are attributed to colds or flus and three times as many as for the next cause listed, gastrointestinal issues.
A related study, by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society, found the number of days off attributable to mental health issues among its members jumped about 50 per cent between 2019 and last year.
O’Reardon makes the point that happier, healthier employees affect a company’s bottom line – Ibec has previously put the cost of poor mental health among staff at up to €2,000 per employee per year – but Shine’s chief executive, Nicola Byrne, says “organisations and businesses also have an obligation to protect people’s mental health in the workplace. Often that’s not realised.
“They focus on slips, trips and falls and the physical elements, but psychosocial risk is as important as the slips, trips and falls. Just as there should be measures in place to ensure employees physical safety, there’s a responsibility to provide for psychological safety, and that applies whether they’re a small company or a large multinational.”
It’s a point echoed by the Communication Workers Union’s Pat Kenny, a long time union representative at the Health and Safety Authority and Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu). “It’s one thing when you are talking about improving safety on building sites through having more inspections but it’s particularly hard for outside bodies to safeguard employees in something like mental health ... what are you supposed to inspect for?”.
Ictu’s Laura Bambrick says legislation has still helped to improve things, with the Employment Equality Acts making the issue one that can result in discrimination cases. “Traditionally, a lot people thought that if you couldn’t see an illness it wasn’t real – the laws around it have focused minds and thankfully attitudes are changing too.”
Feedback received suggests Shine’s training programme, recently trimmed down to make it more accessible, does help to tackle issues such as the stigma around mental health and that improved working environments are something of a win-win for both staff members and the wide range of employers they have worked with. “It can be the public sector, it can be corporate, it can be small companies, although we do find them harder to reach because many organisations that are small end up with a few people having a huge amount of responsibilities and not enough hours in a day,” says Byrne.
“We understand that and we work with them, put them in groups with other small companies so that they can hear from others. But really it’s employers full stop, and it’s free, and it’s a way of them actually meeting their own responsibilities, but also working towards a better workplace.”
Neil McDonnell at small businesses group Isme accepts that many members of that organisation do not have the budgets to emulate the programmes run by some larger firms and multinationals but, he says, a growing number encourage managers to engage positively with employees on the issue. “Listening, checking in and creating space for honest communication can make a big difference to employee’s mental health at work.”
Isme also offer an employee assistance programme (EAP), through Laya healthcare and Spectrum Life, something that has become increasingly popular with larger employers in recent years.
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The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) suggests more than half of workplaces, 56 per cent, offer some such supports. Its recently appointed new director for Ireland, Alison Hodgson, says a growing number of companies are coming to realise the importance of tackling the issue by taking more time over the formulation of detailed mental health policies and how they are implemented. “Progress is certainly being made but employers can still be so much more proactive in this space,” she says.
“If you’re well informed as an employee, you’re more likely to flourish. So employers can play a bigger role in raising awareness and breaking down taboos. They can do that by fostering open discussions about mental health in the workplace, and that will result in lowering anxiety and that can be done through regular check-ins, through anonymous feedback channels, by creating a stigma-free environment.”
The current environment, she says, provides many things to get stressed about, not least the rapid rise of AI and the threat it is perceived to pose to many jobs, but EAPs, she says, can provide significant psychological supports even it is important to remember they are no substitute for a positive workplace culture.
“When people are anxious it can impact their sleeping, their concentration, their physical health and it ultimately affects their work performance, which quickly becomes everybody’s problem. One simple way of helping to address that is by creating an environment in which it’s okay for the employee to simply say: ‘I’m not feeling the best today’.
That, says O’Reardon, is what it boils down to – communication – because in most modern workplaces now, “it’s all KPIs (key performance indicators) and Go! Go! Go!”.
