When Mental Health Support Becomes Routine, Are We Still Listening?
This year's World Mental Health Day theme, Lived Experiences Heard and it asks us to listen to people who know first-hand what poor mental health feels like. For workplaces, I think it raises a useful question. Are we hearing what employees are telling us, and acting on it?
Mental health support at work has come a long way. Employee assistance programmes, Mental Health First Aiders, wellbeing apps and awareness days are now standard in many organisations. Some employers offer excellent support; others offer what they consider adequate. Either way, mental health is firmly on the agenda.
But when something becomes standard, there is a risk it also becomes routine. I have started to wonder whether we are seeing a kind of desensitisation, where support is provided, boxes are ticked, and the conversation stops there. This is not true of every organisation. Yet the latest UK evidence suggests it is a question worth asking.
More support than ever, yet the numbers keep rising
On paper, organisations are doing more. CIPD's 2025 Health and Wellbeing at Work survey found that 57% of organisations now have a standalone wellbeing strategy, which sounds good on paper. Yet over the same period, average sickness absence rose from 5.8 days per employee in 2022 to 9.4 days in 2025. CIPD describes most activity as “reactive not proactive”.
The wider picture is similar. In September 2026, the Mental Health Foundation reported that around 7.2 million UK workers, now have poor mental health. That is the highest level in 15 years. HSE's latest figures show a record 964,000 workers experiencing work-related stress, depression or anxiety in 2024/25, with 22.1 million working days lost.
It would be too simple to put this down to workplace support alone. Pressures outside work play a part too. Health Shield's Britain at Work Report 2026 found that 80% of employees worry about the cost of living, and 53% say NHS waiting times affect their ability to work. People may also be more willing to say they are struggling than they were a decade ago. But these pressures make it more important, not less, that support at work fits the people it is meant for.
So provision has grown, but outcomes have not followed. That gap is where the conversation needs to go next.
Where the weight sits
Much workplace support focuses on the individual such as building resilience, managing stress, practising mindfulness, downloading an app. These tools can help some people. But it is difficult to expect someone to be resilient when the environment, workload or management around them is contributing to how they feel. This is well established. The Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards, the UK framework for managing work-related stress, identify six areas that drive stress at work, demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. Each of these is shaped by how work is designed and managed, not by the individual alone.
The evidence points the same way. When employees are asked what causes their stress, they name the work itself. Mental Health UK's 2026 Burnout Report found the top causes were high or increased workload (42%), unpaid overtime (33%) and fear of redundancy (32%). The Mental Health Foundation's 2026 report highlights low pay, financial insecurity, unmanageable workloads, under-staffing, bullying and a lack of manager support.
Research from the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre adds weight to this. A study of more than 46,000 UK workers found that resilience training, mindfulness, stress management and wellbeing apps made no measurable difference to wellbeing. As the author, Dr William Fleming, put it, organisations “have to change the workplace and not just the worker”.
This does not mean individual support should be removed. It means understanding your own environment first. Every workplace is different, and what helps a team of shift workers may not help an office-based team. Support works best when it responds to the pressures people face in that particular workplace, not when it is put in place because it is standard and then expected to land.
What lived experience is telling us
If we take this year's theme seriously, employees have already told us a great deal. Mental Health UK's 2026 report found that only 27% of workers feel their employer backs mental health with action and resources. Many employers raise awareness, but managers often lack the time, training or resources to support their teams.
The same report found that 35% of workers would not feel comfortable telling their manager they were highly stressed. Of those who took time off for stress, 27% received no support when they returned, and only 17% had a formal return-to-work plan.
The government's Keep Britain Working review, led by Sir Charlie Mayfield, described a “culture of fear” that stops people disclosing health issues early. It called on employers to “rehumanise the workplace”.
This is where I believe desensitisation shows up. Awareness has become familiar, almost expected. But awareness alone does not change how someone experiences their workload, their manager or their return to work.
In practice, desensitisation can look like an awareness post shared every awareness day with nothing following it, support that is mentioned at induction and hardly ever again, or a staff survey completed each year without people seeing what changed as a result. None of this comes from bad intent. It happens when support becomes part of the routine and stops being checked against what people need.
What the law already asks of employers
There is sometimes a grey area around how far an employer's responsibility goes. On the basics, the law is clear. Under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999, employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by assessing the risk and acting on it.
This applies to organisations of every size. Employers with five or more workers must write their risk assessment down; smaller employers do not have to, although HSE recommends it. Where an employee's mental health condition meets the definition of a disability under the Equality Act 2010, employers must also make reasonable adjustments.
In other words, managing work-related stress is not an optional extra. It sits alongside every other health and safety duty.
The direction of travel
The encouraging news is that policy is moving towards prevention. In May 2026, the government published a new 10-year mental health strategy for England. It moves the focus from crisis care to earlier, preventative support, and recognises workplaces as places where mental health is shaped.
The Keep Britain Working programme now has 150 vanguard organisations, employing around 1.5 million people, testing practical approaches to prevention and return to work. HSE is also taking work-related stress more seriously as a legal duty. In December 2025, it served a formal notice on the University of Birmingham for failing to manage stress risks effectively.
The message is consistent. Helping people cope is important, but preventing the conditions that harm them in the first place goes further.
Questions worth asking this World Mental Health Day
Alongside the usual awareness activity, organisations could use 10th October to reflect on a few questions:
Do we know what is causing stress here? Stress risk assessments and staff surveys can show whether workload, staffing or management are the main pressures.
Is our support reaching people? Check whether employees know what is available, and whether they feel safe using it.
Do managers have the time and training to support their teams? Awareness is not enough without the capacity to act.
What happens when someone comes back after time off? A clear return-to-work plan can make the difference between recovery and relapse.
Are we acting on what employees tell us? Listening is the first step. Showing people what has changed because of their feedback is what builds trust.
A good place to start is HSE's own resources, built around the six Management Standards. The Talking Toolkit, aimed at businesses, gives managers simple questions to discuss each area with their teams. The Stress Indicator Tool gathers anonymous feedback from staff. For smaller organisations especially, much of prevention comes down to how work is organized, realistic workloads, clear roles, regular conversations and managers with time to listen.
Hearing lived experience means more than inviting people to share. It means letting what they say shape how work is organised.
Natasha Rhone BSc (Hons), MSc
Founder | Organisational Psychology Consultant
With a passion for understanding what shapes people’s experiences at work.
Her work focuses on the influences that affect employee engagement, experience and wellbeing, and on helping organisations create working environments where people can do their best work without compromising their health and wellbeing.
For Natasha, workplace wellbeing is not simply about what individuals can do to look after themselves. It is also about the organisation, the culture, the systems and the everyday experiences that shape how people feel and function at work.
References
CIPD and Simplyhealth (2025). Health and Wellbeing at Work survey, summarised by Mills & Reeve
Clyde & Co (2026). HSE increase their focus on work-related stress
Department of Health and Social Care (2026). Government to transform mental health care with new strategy
Department for Work and Pensions (2026). Keep Britain Working review: March 2026 update
Fleming, W. (2024). Employee well-being outcomes from individual-level mental health interventions. Industrial Relations Journal. Oxford Wellbeing Research Centre
Health Shield (2026). Britain at Work Report 2026
Health and Safety Executive. Stress risk assessment
Health and Safety Executive (2025). Stress Awareness Week 2025: Time to act on work-related stress
Health and Safety Executive (2025). Work-related ill health statistics 2024/25, reported by the British Safety Council
Health and Safety Executive. What are the Management Standards?
Mayfield, C. (2025). Keep Britain Working: final report
Mental Health Foundation (2026). Employment and Mental Health Inequality, reported by Fair Play Talks
Mental Health UK (2026). The Burnout Report 2026
World Federation for Mental Health (2026). World Mental Health Day 2026
