The meaning of morality

As we marked Mental Health Day on October 10, I have been asked several times about mental health issues in the workplace and specifically about how they are caused.

Which is a strange question. The answer to that is "life," and it is interpreted differently for each of us.

But the question is a valid one, as personnel management is a key function in every organisation and a function that concerns all managers.

l was taught early on the wisdom of starting off by looking to find the human weaknesses – the illnesses we all are subject to.

Managers are, first of all, human beings just like workers, subject to the same emotional and physical strains.

Secondly, mental health is often a problem for normal human beings, as physical health is. Most people will suffer from memory loss or an attack of anxiety as often as they will get the flu, affecting both managers and employees equally.

There are longer-lasting and often chronic mental health problems, such as the loss of a relationship that leaves a big, silent hole in a person’s life and can develop into a loss of self-confidence or fear of other people – a social dysfunction that will affect work performance and may need attention and even therapy, as do physical ailments like arthritis.

A manager may not know how to help, but using the company’s EAP and seeing a therapist does.

I have seen people’s careers ruined when similar mental problems block their chances of promotion to a leadership role.

They can affect a person's mental state, from being mild to traumatic, from being tolerable to inconvenient, where they disturb other employees, may be dangerous and must be dealt with professionally. Often such illnesses are covered by assistance from company medical and sickness plans. Employees whose lives and performances are affected should seek help from HR or, as my father, a country doctor, advised: "If you have a toothache, go to a dentist."

If you have depression, go to a counsellor.

As my coach told me, "First check if there is a physical issue...it might be a kidney problem or a hormonal imbalance, which can affect any employee at work, and often does."

There are also rare mental health problems employees may have arising out of other people’s psychological and mental problems which may affect them, such as psychopathy or sadism, a compelling impulse to cruelty, which Dr MS Peck exposed in the New England Journal of Medicine.

When I was doing my master’s degree in education in Canada, the instance of sadism as a personality factor, which behavioural statisticians claimed appeared in one-ten per cent of professional teachers and medical personnel, surprised me. As far as I know, those statistics are not kept in TT, but people note it exists – in the bullying now openly displayed both in our classrooms and in offices.

In theory, it was claimed to be at least partly in response to the relatively powerless status bullies hold in relation to their own abusive parents, and later as employees, in the face of bullying supervisors. The psychic pain children carry as a result is a factor in suicide.

I am not sure about the statistics here (if any are kept in-depth at all). I suspect children are more affected by other children’s cruelty once they are in school, and can only hope teachers’ employment contracts include observation and supervision of their behavioural changes.

This emphasises the need for clear technical standards in whatever the employment involves. The responsibility for other people's lives is a responsibility that is taken on when anyone accepts a supervisory or management position. Power can be exploited in all sorts of ways, including by managers, who are given control over others for the majority of their waking hours. It is a serious charge.

Even outside corporate life, people, in particular women, have been the victims of abusive control, which may contribute to both cognitive and physical problems in subsequent life.

The result has appeared in the press every other day, in reports of women and children abused, wounded and far too often dying from physical, sexual and mental abuse.

This has been twisted and exacerbated by poverty and by the demands put on us by the ultimate controls and regulations of the state.

People don’t talk honestly about it, and by not doing so, the power is left in the control of the exploiter.

But sex work, which is legal and subject to income tax in other countries, is currently among the most common untaxed employment categories in this economy. Not just among the otherwise unemployed, but staffed by mothers of fatherless school-age children.

The most urgent and moral of the obligations of any parent is to raise and educate their children.

Those marginally employed on minimum wages cannot feed, clothe, provide transport, shelter, school fees and schoolbooks on what they earn alone.

As more children are born, this has become one of the most common issues for parents who cannot pay energy charges for internet connections for digital schoolwork.

The connections will enable children to fulfil the government-directed objectives that the population must enter the digital economy. A minority have donated computers to ensure in the future, as citizens, they will be able to join the digital economy and bring us, as a nation, into the international ambit. But energy to operate computers is very expensive and not free.

Work puts some people in positions of power over others. And when a young woman is desperately struggling to earn enough to support and educate a child or three without skills that are currently in demand for part-time work, she is vulnerable. It is not for love or attraction she succumbs to sex work, despite what men think.

It is the need to survive and to support an elderly parent and growing children, often when escaping abuse and violence. She is not immoral.

How moral can you get beyond being the one left behind to support and educate your children alone? And sacrificing yourself to do it?