Blog,
By Jo Reyes, GBI COO
Mental health is a human right and should be considered part of a company’s responsibility to respect all human rights. Respecting the right to mental health throughout operations, products and services can pose a significant challenge for companies. But it’s not one that can be ignored. A deeper understanding can support your human rights journey.
This month the WHO and ILO have reinforced the need for a global focus on mental health in the workplace. This is welcomed. But to date, few companies consult their human rights specialists or use the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) to guide their approach to mental health – either in the workplace or in assessing and remediating mental health impacts of their operations, products and services on customers and communities.
This can result in a gap in fully understanding human rights risks. To demonstrate this, we need to look at why human rights practitioners should be working cross-functionally and across business activities.
I. In the workplace, yes … and beyond
A lack of attention to mental health responsibilities of companies came into very sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic and highlighted many instances requiring the involvement of human rights practitioners.
We’ve also witnessed significant issues demonstrating the need to focus on workplace mental health with worker suicides in technology production and sectors like agriculture, where lack of a living wage and stability can have deep implications. So, too, in white-collar jobs including the legal profession and in the financial sector.
Beyond a more conventional workplace analysis, it’s also crucial to assess the mental health impacts of placing colleagues in high-risk contexts such as conflict-affected areas, or the mental impact on colleagues - and communities - of exiting a market due to conflict or other crises.
Serious incidents causing harm to mental health are also seen outside the workplace, such as in the wake of chemical and oil spills from the effects of clean-ups, and actual or perceived toxicity. And prominent right now, social media platforms are under extreme scrutiny in relation to tragic teen suicides, with a court finding of contribution in the UK from self-harm and suicide images.
Unfortunately, there are many more clear examples of wider business impacts on mental health, coupled with a failure to identify mental health as a salient risk to those affected.
II. Effective remedy cannot ignore the mental health of the victim and needs to be considered at every stage of remediation
Because of its cross-cutting nature, adopting a human rights lens to a company’s mental health impacts, and a mental health lens to its human rights impacts can bring about a better understanding of the issue and how to remediate it.
The UNGPs outline responsibilities of companies to remediate human rights harms. This means providing effective remedy for any mental harm for an abuse. Also, in accordance with international remedial standards, it involves preventing or mitigating the potential for mental harm caused by the process of obtaining remedy. Risks can include re-traumatisation, triggering of PTSD, stigmatisation, ostracisation, stress and anxiety and elongated victim narratives in unnecessarily protracted processes.
Importantly, certain forms of remedy aim for positive mental health outcomes, such as victim impact statements, apologies and guarantees of non-repetition. Conversely, the application of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) or of inexpert or inappropriate forms of psychological support may worsen the mental outcome for the victim.
III. Human rights practitioners should be involved in considerations of mental health impacts
Much of international human rights law is based on an understanding that mental ill health affects human rights and access to them, but also that human rights abuses affect mental health. We have clear examples of this relationship in cases of sexual harassment or excessive working hours. And because of this connection, identifying mental health issues, whether in the workplace or beyond, can flag other human rights risks, as well as being a risk in and of itself.
A deeper understanding of the interconnection between mental health and human rights can reveal a great deal about the human rights risks and impacts of a company’s operations, products and services. So it is important to involve human rights specialists in areas where mental health could be impacted by the company.
Whilst human resources and health and safety expertise are vital, a human rights practitioner can act as a prism through which a company can assess associated human rights and mental health risks in a more holistic way.
A better understanding of mental health risks can increase companies’ ability to both identify and ameliorate adverse human rights risks across operations, products and services and improve the effectiveness of remedy for business-related human rights harms, helping tackle problems more systemically in the workplace and beyond.
Find out more on mental health and business and human rights in our podcast.