Depression, a common term for a sad or low mood or the loss of pleasure; an emotion that does not affect capacity to perform personal and vocational obligations
Workplace stress comes at a huge human and economic cost, but changing it requires a seismic shift in attitudes, writes Steve Dow.
Late shift … erratic working hours and stressful office environments can trigger depression.
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Advertisement Samantha Paige was always good at hiding her darker side. As a business manager with the Department of Defence in Canberra, she was responsible for a budget of up to $14 million and the “day-to-day happiness” and needs of 80 people.
The irony of that brief is not lost on her. “You go all day every day with a smile on your face, and then get home and fall in a heap,” she says. A telephone conversation with her mother in 2001 about Paige’s sister “always feeling sad” crystallised the problem: a family history of depression. “I always felt sad, too. I don’t remember feeling any different.”
Paige, then 25, confided her sadness in a counsellor who was regularly dispatched by her employer to make the rounds of the office to inquire about staff members’ wellbeing. He referred Paige to a psychologist for weekly counselling; cognitive behavioural therapy, which emphasises learning how to moderate behaviours and thoughts. Her employer paid for the initial sessions, and by mutual agreement Paige paid for the rest. She also took anti-depressants for 2 years.
A few weeks after beginning counselling, Paige told her closest colleagues of her condition; those who needed to know so that she could confide in them when she was having a bad day, in order to delegate or delay decision-making. It wasn’t an easy decision to disclose her illness. The colleagues were supportive, if stunned.
Organisational psychologist Peter Cotton says employees in both the public and private sectors are sometimes scared to put their hands up and say they are suffering depression, for fear they will be marginalised or lose their jobs. “A lot of senior managers are still sceptical,” he says. “They think employee stress is due to workers’ under-performance.”
Highet and Cotton, who are both trying to achieve cultural change in handling depression by educating senior executives and managers in workplaces such as the Australian Taxation Office and Centrelink as well as private companies such as Qantas, say the illness can have numerous causes: a family history of depression can sometimes predispose people to depressive illness, while bereavement and relationship breakdown, as well as stresses at work, can all be triggers.
It is often impossible to blame an individual’s depression on a single cause, however. Bad employee management is certainly a risk factor. Cotton says employees can and do accuse managers of bullying as an “industrial tool” against their employers, but he also sees workers with “genuinely serious problems because they have been exposed to dreadful management practices”.
Highet says she is concerned with bullying “embedded in the culture”, in workplaces whose managers do not tolerate perceived weakness, even though someone admitting and getting help for their depression, for instance, should be commended as courageous.
Promotional opportunities can be denied even those who are treated, have recovered and moved on. Highet recalls giving a training session on depression where one manager said: “I wouldn’t tolerate someone on anti-depressants on my team.” Highet says that, with one in five Australians suffering depression at some point in their lifetime, or 800,000 at any one time, chances are there has already been someone with depression on that manager’s team.
Spotting a depressed worker:
- Screening calls to avoid contact.
- Irritability, sometimes aggression.
- Increased alcohol and drug use.
- Avoiding social get-togethers.
- Coming to work tired
- Regularly sad
- Lack of interest or pleasure
Weight reduction:
Samantha Paige, who is now 29, says she suffered depression “because, basically, I hated myself”.
“If something went wrong, it was my fault. Now it’s a case of ’stuff happens’. Back then, it was, ‘I’m such a horrible person.”‘
Depression, as she describes it, is a “heavy feeling. There’s blackness inside. You feel really dark. Like there’s a huge weight inside of you, but at the same time, a huge hole.”
Paige thinks genetics played a large part in her depression, and doesn’t blame her work, although “certainly work stress doesn’t help, or stress of any kind”.
Last year, she separated from her partner, quit her job in Canberra and moved to Melbourne and started her own business, a training consultancy.
She’s been fairly happy since, barring a small relapse into depression earlier this year, which she attributes to failing to pay enough attention to her stress levels and working too hard. She’s feeling well now.
Tags: Depression employee depression promotional opportunities stress worl place
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