Thank you, Mr. Speaker. We’ve heard a lot in the House about GNWT jobs and vacancies. But something not often spoken about that is a huge drain on our resources, both human and financial, is absenteeism.
According to the NWT 2013 Public Service Annual Report, the work absence rate for the GNWT public service was 12.3 days per employee. This is a decrease from 2012, when it was 13.2 days, and 2011, when it was 14.7 days. I guess it’s a good thing that that number is going down, but this statistic means that every NWT employee was absent from work one day every month of the year. That’s a lot of days off.
The reasons why people are absent are many, but one we seldom talk about, and hardly ever admit to, is days away from work because of poor mental health or mental illness.
A 2011 study showed that one in three workplace disability claims are related to mental illness. Many of those claims are stress related. Stress is causing disability due to mental illness in many people.
Of those 12.3 days absent per employee in 2013, how many were due to poor mental health or mental illness? I’m sure all of us know people who have taken mental health days away from work, whether they were really mentally ill or just taking advantage of their sick days allotment. Either way, it’s a day away from work when the work did not get done.
Any illness at work can have a significant effect on employee morale and productivity, so it’s advantageous for the employer to protect its biggest investment: its people. Physical illness we talk about, but mental illness we do not. Four in 10 people say that they would hide or ignore a mental illness from their workplace, and less than 25 percent of people would talk to their employer about their mental illness.
The stigma around mental illness and the shame that people feel because they have a mental illness prevents their mental health concerns from being properly addressed. We must change that. We have to start talking about it. We need to accept mental illness as an illness as normal as any physical illness and we have to de-stigmatize mental illness in our conversations. We need to make it normal to talk about it and to ask for help with mental illness, just like a physical illness. If we do that, there will be a greater understanding and
support for our co-workers who suffer from mental illness, and if we get that greater understanding and provide greater support we will create a healthier workplace with reduced absenteeism.
I will have questions for the Minister of Human Resources at the appropriate time.