Mental Health and Well-being of Employees in the Education Sector

Running head: MENTAL HEALTH
Mental health and well-being of employees in the education sector
Name of the student:
Name of the University:
Author’s note

Mental health and well-being of employees in the education sector
Introduction:
According to the WHO definition, mental health is defined as a state of complete
physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease. Any individual is
considered as mentally healthy if they have the capability to cope with life stressors, realized
their own potential and work productively to contribute to the society (World Health
Organization, 2014). However, different environmental and contextual factors have resulted in
the rise in mental health issues. The issue of mental health risk particularly at workplace is a
great area of concern as in Australia as it has resulted in employee turnover and poor
productivity. Many employees do not even recognize that their symptom of anxiety is the first
sign of mental illness. Hence, appropriate mental health programs needs to be implemented for
this population group in an educational context. Here, I will present some overarching issues
related to mental illness in workplace and demonstrate how one specific initiative or program can
address issues related to effective education on mental health and well-being
Target stakeholders:
Through this blog, I aim to propose method of implementation of ‘Mental Health –
National Mental Health Workplace Initiative’ for employees at risk of mental illness in an
educational setting. I am pitching the program implementation process to all stakeholders who
will be involved in the project such as my colleagues, the executive staffs, the education staffs,
social workers and other interest employees.
Need for evolution of suitable educational programs:

For me, one of the greatest areas of concern is the rate at which people are being
diagnosed with mental illness and particularly the high risk of depression and anxiety in younger
population group in workplace. Let’s have a look at some statistics to understand how grave the
issues of mental illness are for employees in the education sector:
 Depression, anxiety, mood disorder and psychotic disorders are some categories of
mental illness found in working population (Gayed et al., 2018).
 It is the leading cause of ill-health disability worldwide
 The rate of stress and anxiety is particularly high in workplace as employees deal with
several target pressures and deadline
 The cost of workplace mental illness in Australia in the year 2015-2016 was found to be
$12.8 billion (Parliament of Australia, 2018).
 Employees working in higher educational setting are contacting counselling support in
large numbers because of excessive workloads, culture of workplace surveillance and
precarious contracts (Devon, 2016).
The above statistics shows that mental illness has direct impact on mental outcomes of higher
education staffs and as it hampers their productivity, there is a need to educate people in such
settings to positively cope with pressure. Workplace place mental programs provide opportunity
to educate at-risk people about modifiable risk and protective factors for mental health.
Psychosocial working condition is a major reason for work-related stress and anxiety (Gayed et
al., 2018). Hence, educational programs can target managers and employees to give education
regarding making proper adjustments in work environment and implementing supportive
behaviour towards mental health of staffs. However, I have seen that most mental health
programs are not feasible because of several barriers faced in education about well-being.
Some list of barriers includes the following:

 Firstly, excessive overload of information particularly related to biomedical rationales for
behavioural change is a barrier to effective uptake of message among target population
 Lack of approach to address the needs and preferences of the target group
 Firstly, cultural diversity is a concept that creates challenges in the process. For example,
different in cultures and values create major challenge for health care professionals in
establishing therapeutic relationship and educating people about mental health.
 In addition, educators often engaged in one-way communication where participants were
only passive recipients of knowledge (Hempler et al., 2018)
This suggests the need for evolution of existing health education program related to mental
illness. The above issues faced in education about mental health well-being and knowledge
motivated me to implement a mental health promotion program that addresses the above barriers
in education.
Details about the program:
In educational setting, I observed that employees are often stressed out about the work
targets and the pressure to satisfy the increasing student expectations. Managers in higher
university also give them additional pressure to maintain university rankings and reputation of
the organization. In addition, regular teaching audits and culture of workplace surveillance
always make academic staff vulnerable to workload and mental issues like anxiety and
eventually depression (Kelly, 2017). This workplace related stress often results when employees
are unable to cope with work demands. In such case, instead of reprimanding them, university
managers should look to make universities more human and rewarding workplaces where talent
can thrive and prosper instead of getting destroyed because of excessive scrutiny. Workplace
stress has been a neglected aspect of mental health wellbeing because of poor management, lack
of support and unsatisfactory working conditions (Maulik, 2017). Hence, I have selected the