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Bullying, shift work and staff cuts, are helping make stress the greatest health hazard in UK workplaces, according to research. Separate studies by trade unions and employers have both confirmed stress as a major problem in the workplace. Two out of three union officials surveyed by the Trades Union Congress said stress was the number one concern - largely due to workloads. Meanwhile, three out of four employers told Industrial Society surveyors that stress was set to be their greatest health and safety issue in the next two years. see new stress standards

The most stressed workers are in London and Scotland 

Bullying, cited as a key contributor to stress, is common in the voluntary sector and government offices, as well as the high-pressure worlds of banking and finance. 

Despite growing recognition of the problem, fewer than a third of firms were monitoring stress. 

"Employers are aware of stress and its consequences but are still struggling to find ways of identifying and dealing with it," said Pat McGuinness of the Industrial Society
Having open and honest lines of communication where employees feel they can freely acknowledge that they are under stress without fear of retribution can go some way to alleviating the problem." 

John Monks, TUC general secretary, said a modern, 24-hour economy did not have to mean long hours. "We should be working better not longer," he said. The TUC has called for compensation for victims if bosses had not assessed the risks properly. 

The Industrial Society found some firms were keen to tackle stress and were offering aromatherapy, reflexology or exercise classes. 

MENTAL ILLNESS

The high pressure environment of the modern work place is fuelling widespread problems with mental health, according to a survey. 
Research by the mental health charity Mind found that more people blame stress at work for problems with mental health than any other cause. 

People believe job problems are more likely to cause mental illness than marriage breakdown, bereavement or loneliness. Mind questioned 1,500 people who have donated money to Mind about their perceptions of mental illness. It found that 61% of people believed work stress was the main cause of mental problems from depression to severe illness. 

Loneliness was thought to be a common factor by 59% of people, followed by bereavement (55%), traumatic events (52%), the demands of modern life (50%) and relationship problems (50%). 

Reluctance to admit problems 

The survey showed that even people with a high awareness of mental health issues were reluctant to admit they might have a problem. 

Of the Mind donors questioned, 27% said they would lie to their boss if they had to take time off work because of mental stress, pretending they were suffering from physical rather than emotional problems. 

A third said they would be too embarrassed to tell their neighbours and a quarter would shy away from confessing to colleagues if they had a mental illness. Mind estimates that in any one year one in four adults will suffer from some form of mental distress or illness. 

The survey found that many people thought the problem was getting worse, with 56% believing children growing up in this decade would be more vulnerable to mental health problems. 

A spokesman for Mind said: "Mental health problems are set to escalate across the globe by 2020 and we need to make the public aware of how mental health will become an even more crucial issue in this new millennium." 

The survey was published on World Mental Health Day, aimed at challenging the stigma of mental illness. 

Other initiatives include an advert commissioned by the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Changing Minds campaign will run in cinemas this week, aimed at challenging the stigma of mental illness. And a new project for young people called Headstuff aims to educate teenagers about mental problems. 

IT revolution fuels workplace stress
A new report says that increasing numbers of people suffer from stress because of changes in work practices - and it is costing governments and companies billions of dollars a year. 
The International Labour Organisation (ILO), a UN agency handling employment issues, drew these conclusions in a survey drawn from separate studies conducted in five industrialised countries. 
The results led the ILO to predict a dramatic worldwide increase in depression and stress as new technologies grow and globalisation accelerates. 

It said that incidences of stress, depression and burnout had increased over the past decade with up to one in 10 workers affected. 
 

Alarming increase 

The increase in depression in particular was "alarming", the survey said. 

Changes in the diagnostic system and more open attitudes towards mental illness meant that the rise was not necessarily absolute. But depression was now the second most disabling illness for workers after heart disease, the survey said. And incidences of mental, neurological and behavioural disorders are rising so fast that they will overtake road accidents, Aids and violence as the primary cause of work years lost due to premature death or disability. 

Immense cost 

The cost of the problem to employers and governments is said to run to billions of dollars a year. 

In the US, $40bn is spent on the treatment of depression alone and 200 million working days are lost every year. 

Four per cent of the EU's gross national product is spent on mental health problems. 

Causes 

Job insecurity and rising unemployment have contributed to high stress rates in Finland, Poland and Germany. 

In Finland, the problem is particularly severe, with more than 50% of workers suffering from burnout and 7% severe burnout. 

But in Britain and the US, the problem is attributed to the pressures of mastering the information technology revolution and increased productivity demands. 

Companies are having to change working practices to cope with rising mental health bills. 

"These trends represent a wake-up call for business," the ILO report said. 

Workers urged to monitor illness

Britain's 20 million workers are being urged to examine their own bodies for signs of industrial illness. 

The Trades Union Congress wants employees to do what it calls "body mapping" so that patterns of ill health can be discovered across workplaces. Under the scheme, people would identify aches and pains on an outline map of their bodies and then compare them with those of their colleagues to see if there are similarities. 

The union's argument is that many forms of industrial illness took decades to be recognised as such, so gathering evidence of links between particular ailments and particular workplaces will speed that process. 

The head of the TUC, John Monks, denies that he is "scaremongering". 

It's about finding out what's hurting and killing people at work and stopping it before more lives are needlessly put in danger," he said. Mr Monks also said unions had identified most of the industrial diseases despite the resistance of employers. 

Compensation claims 

Pneumoconiosis in miners, stress, industrial deafness, vibration white finger and Repetitive Strain Injury are all now recognised and have led to sufferers gaining compensation. 

Some employers fear, though, that publicity for an ailment prompts people to think they have got it. 

Some doctors believe that some apparent sufferers of Repetitive Strain Injury, for example, only imagine it. 

There is no doubt that RSI does exist - workers who press keyboards many times a second for hours on end, for example, get a swelling in their fore-arms and the injury and pain is obvious. But other forms of RSI where there are no visible signs and where the employee does not hit the keyboard as frequently are not so clear. 

Some doctors allege in these cases that publicity prompts people to feel pain they had not noticed before. 

But the TUC believes that if anything industrial injury is under-recognised. 

It says it has worked for decades to convince employers that work can make employees ill - asbestos was recognised as poisonous a century before it was banned. 

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