Partners for Mental Health are blunt. They call it the cost of doing nothing.
That’s the cost of employers failing to address mental illness in the workplace.
PFMH has all the data. 500,000 Canadians will miss work today due to mental illness. One in three disability claims are related to mental illness. The cost of mental illness to Canada’s economy is estimated to be $51 billion per year – or about five times the current Ontario deficit.
Yet even talking about it is a stretch in most workplaces. According to PFMH only 23 per cent of Canadians would be willing to talk about their mental illness with their employer. That’s means more than three out of four would not.
If we can’t talk about it, how do we begin to deal with it?
It becomes particularly tricky when many of our employers are still using destructive attendance management programs. Given widespread stigma that exists around mental illness, workers could fairly wonder how their mental illness will be treated in such an environment.
OPSEU Diablogue 