Reflection: making Tough Decisions on Mental Health Concerns

How comfortable are you, in advising subordinates, to receive diagnosis from medical professionals, on their workplace behaviour?

I always find it troubling to ask this. Sometimes a staff will go berserk and quit because they cannot deal with the thought of questioning their own sanity.

We must teach people that behavioural patterns are like catching a common cold. Humans often have no control over their conditions. We can only examine, or deny what we see.

Just offered a staff, the opportunity to receive help from the right people, if the staff wants help, on concerns about 'compulsive lying'. Never sure if I'm doing the right thing. But I think, this is help offered on an indeterminate concern - we are not qualified to further diagnose or treat certain symptoms.

Perhaps, a better protocol that can be practiced across the entire workforce, should be put into law.

From a RMD point of view, I'm just mitigating the risk of underreacting to indifference. We are throwing the kitchen sink of therapies at this one... short of reducing ourselves to hourly nannies - we can't afford to do that.

I have a very simple model of behavioural bucketing. Non-compliance with any social norm * ... can be attributed to the actor being either lazy, stupid, or evil. Bear with me, for this model is like all models, leaky, but not leaky enough to be useless.

Now based on that model, I can safely say that I generally don't care what the actual reason is... I don't believe it is possible to determine the truth behind the motivations of any private counterparty. So all non-compliance in a counterparty is basically dealt with the same way, with the same penalties and rewards, regardless of motivation in the actor.

However, at the meta-level, it's useful to discuss behaviour. What I am addressing in the post above is purely about how we discuss behaviour, after all the penalties and rewards are said and done.

In the case of this particular individual, I do not think that new therapies will be invoked in time to save their integration into our firm. However, it may benefit the general well-being of the individual due to an improvement in self-understanding, and perhaps in their future opportunities in other firms. I shall keep the group updated on how this all turns out!

(* business norms are a sort of social norm, all the way down to the rules in each organisation, because business is a social activity by definition)