Thursday · 30 April 2020

What people mean by a mental health day

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Rest and Wellbeing · Permalink

The phrase has become common enough to have lost a clear meaning. Used loosely it covers everything from a single day taken because the week has become unmanageable to a formal absence connected to a diagnosed condition, and those are not the same thing in any respect that matters to a workplace.

It is worth separating them, because the confusion causes real problems in both directions. Treating every hard week as clinical inflates the language until it stops carrying weight. Treating a serious and long-running difficulty as a bad day denies it the arrangements it needs.

The ordinary version

The everyday sense is close to what an older vocabulary called a day off. Somebody has been running at capacity, something has to give, and a day away from the work prevents a larger failure later. Whether that day is best taken as sick leave, as annual leave, or as an informal arrangement is a policy question, and different workplaces answer it differently.

The awkwardness is definitional. Many absence schemes are written around incapacity, and a person taking a preventive day is not incapacitated in the sense the scheme means. This is one reason people so often reach for a physical symptom instead: not because they are lying about how they feel, but because the form has no box for what is actually happening.

Where it stops being a scheduling question

There is a threshold past which this is no longer a matter of workload and calendars. Where difficulty is persistent, worsening, or interfering with ordinary functioning, it belongs with a qualified professional rather than with a manager or a policy document, and nothing in a workplace article is a substitute for that.

What a workplace can usefully do is narrower and more concrete. Make it possible to take a day without constructing a story. Say plainly in the policy whether such days are covered and under what heading. Train managers to respond to the request and not to the explanation. And keep whatever is said in that conversation out of the general record.

The value of getting the vocabulary right is not tidiness. It is that people describe their situation accurately when there is a category that fits, and accurate description is the only thing that makes any of the arrangements work.