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Our Aims
This group is led by Dr Jo Billings and Dr Danielle Lamb
Mental health problems affect nearly 1 in 7 workers in the UK (Mental Health Foundation, 2022). Globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of US$ 1 trillion per year in lost productivity (WHO, 2022). Good work can be good for mental health, but poor working environments - including discrimination and inequality, excessive workloads, lack of resources, limited job control and job insecurity - pose a risk to mental health.
Members of the Mental Health at Work SIG are interested in mental health in a broad range of occupational contexts but are particularly keen to better support staff working in the public sector.
In healthcare, we have seen a significant impact of work on the mental health and wellbeing of staff, with a UCL led study demonstrating that 58% of frontline health and social care workers across the UK met criteria for probable anxiety, depression or PTSD during the first wave of the COVID pandemic (Greene et al., 2021). The NHS Check Study, co-led by staff at UCL and King’s College London, has further demonstrated the deleterious effects of workforce shortages and increased workloads, as well as the potential benefits of good leadership and peer support, on healthcare workers’ mental health (Lamb et al., 2022). Mental health professionals are also not immune, with high rates of stress, burnout and vicarious trauma often going unrecognised (Billings et al., 2021).
Similarly, in academia, recent research with staff working in higher education in the UK has shown that 53.2% report probable signs of depression (Education Support Report, 2021) and that 9 out of 10 agree or strongly agree that their work is stressful (UCU Report, 2014). Another recent report in Nature revealed that out of 7,600 postdocs surveyed, 51% had considered leaving science because of depression, anxiety or work-related issues (Woolston, 2020).
The Mental Health at Work SIG aims to bring together colleagues from across academia, healthcare, the emergency services, and anyone interested in their own and others’ mental health at work, to provide a forum for sharing and discussing policy, practice and research in staff mental health and wellbeing.