How businesses can support staff who may be facing trauma
This guide has been produced by City Mental Health Alliance and Centre for Mental Health to help businesses become “trauma-informed”. It will help businesses to better understand and support their people through the psychological and emotional traumas that people may have experienced in 2020. The guide mainly relates to the impact of Covid-19 pandemic, but it also looks at the difficult and triggering conversations and experiences of racism, and some of the lessons are relevant for other causes as well. We have provided an overview of some of the difficulties that people may experience – from more mild trauma to post-traumatic stress disorder – and some practical tips for employers to reduce the risks to their people’s mental health, both in the short- and long-term.
All of us will be affected in different ways by the seismic events of 2020 and all of us will react in different ways. Some will come through the crisis with no ill effects to their mental wellbeing. Others will have experienced distress so severe that they will meet the clinical criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Others will find themselves somewhere in between. It is estimated that at least half a million more people in the UK will experience some kind of mental health difficulty this year as a result of Covid-19. We hope this guide provides some useful information, as well as ideas, so that employers are better able to support their people who are living with trauma.
