The Mood Disorders Society of Canada (MDSC) has published a new handbook for employers on how to deal with mental-health issues in a work environment. Mental Health in the Workplace, launched on April 23 at the Canadian Educators Conference on Mental Health in Ottawa, is now available for free download from the MDSC website, and employers may also request hard copies of the book by e-mailing the organization.

The 33-page handbook is intended as a comprehensive resource for companies that want to create a healthy work environment, according to a press release from the MDSC. It is the result of a survey that the organization – in conjunction with global pharmaceutical company H. Lundbeck A/S – conducted with employers and workers across Canada, asking them about their own perceptions of mental illness, whether they were experiencing it or observing it in colleagues.

“We know that one in five Canadians will have a mental illness or issue each year,” MDSC national executive director Phil Upshall wrote in the handbook’s preface. “We also know that unaddressed mental illness in the workplace cost Canadian businesses more than $20 billion in lost productivity (from absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover) in 2011.”

Upshall added that the handbook was also intended as a guide for employers to spur open discussion and dialogue, develop support programs for workers with mental illness, to help them recover and achieve higher productivity.

Mental Health in the Workplace deals with the following topics:

• the human cost of not dealing with workplace mental illness;
• presenteeism, or employees who show up, but perform little work;
• a step-by-step approach to adopting the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety, the world’s first mental-health standard of its kind, in a workplace;
• how to implement a workplace program of psychological health and safety; and
• six things that smaller organizations can do to create a healthy work environment.

The handbook also includes an appendix that summarizes the results of the Lundbeck/MDSC survey. After polling 1,000 workers and managers between the ages of 16 and 64, the survey found that 79 per cent of workers experiencing depression had never seen a doctor for a diagnosis, 70 per cent of them would not tell their employers about it and 75 per cent continued to work despite depression symptoms.

“Mental illness affects all Canadians,” Upshall wrote. “The overarching message that Mood Disorders Society of Canada wants to convey in all its work is that recovery from mental illness is possible.”

Mental Health in the Workplace can be accessed online or downloaded at http://www.mooddisorderscanada.ca/documents/WorkplaceHealth_En.pdf.