Help alleviate workplace worries this Men’s Health Week

It’s Men’s Health Week and this year’s campaign is focused around promoting mental well-being in men.

The week aims to tackle the stigma of men’s mental health and encourages men to seek help if they are feeling down. And with job security, work and money being reported as the top three issues on men’s anxiety lists, what better way to help make a difference than in the office?

Shock statistics

Men and women experience mental health problems in roughly equal numbers, but men are much less likely to be diagnosed and treated for it. According to the Men’s Health Forum, 75% of all suicides are by men and 73% of people who go missing are men. What’s more, the Health & Social Care Information Centre 2009 household survey found that about 2.7 million men in England currently have a mental health problem, such as depression, anxiety or stress.

Research by Mind suggests that more than a third (37%) of men are feeling worried or low, and around one in three men drink at a potentially harmful level.

Shockingly, in the UK, more than 4,500 men kill themselves each year and more men hang themselves than die on the roads. To highlight these issues, the Men’s Health Forum has launched a campaign to encourage men to talk about their feelings with others, instead of bottling them up. The straplines for the campaign include “I’d rather admit I like Justin Bieber… Let’s talk about feeling down.”

Martin Tod is Chief Executive of the Men’s Health Forum. He says: “If all men could talk about how they were feeling with confidence, I don’t think we’d be looking at horrific figures like these. Whatever the problem, your GP has heard it before. And these days there are telephone and online options too. Don’t bottle it up.”

Help available for men

Online resources are available to help your office organisation promote Men’s Health Week, or find out more about a range of men’s health issues. Passing on details of the website to your staff, to highlight the awareness week, may be just the encouragement a member of your team needs to seek help for a problem.

There may also be changes you can make as a business to promote staff wellbeing and encourage your employees to share their feelings. This could be as simple as leaving out some information leaflets regarding ‘taboo’ health issues, or implementing a system where staff can talk to a nominated member of the team in confidence, about any problems they may have.