Practical pointers arising from the cases

• wherever practical, employees should be encouraged to share with the employer, if appropriate via his or her rep, the nature of mental health problems, including the risk of psychiatric injury and practical suggestions as to relevant stressors and how they can best be avoided;

• employees should be encouraged to be well-organised in collating evidence to back up any grievance, including keeping clear records, using email to record dates and times, and keeping a journal logging incidents; and

• employees should remember the risk that if, after consultation, investigation and a thorough review of medical evidence, there genuinely is no other way of reducing the risk of psychiatric injury to a particular employee, an employer may be justified in demoting that employee or requiring them to agree to a change of duties (which could be temporary or permanent), or even dismissal, in order to avoid that risk. Only in the most serious of cases might this be justified as a last resort.

In practice, employees fear stigma and the risk of losing their job if they are open about the risk of psychiatric injury — especially at a time of economic uncertainty when jobs are at risk. Recent survey evidence (referred to in Chapter 2) shows how fearful employees are, increasingly choosing to hide their stress, pretending that any sickness absence is down to other factors. Elsewhere in this booklet, we have focused on the importance of encouraging employers to view stress as an organisational problem, to be remedied by addressing work processes and working conditions, as opposed to an individual issue, around individual behaviours and personalities.