Workplace mental health — advisory and training
Most employers handle mental health well right up until someone is actually unwell.
That is the point where the policy meets a real person, and it is usually where things go wrong. The adjustment stalls. The absence process starts running. The manager stops replying because they are frightened of saying the wrong thing.
I advise HR teams on those situations and train the managers who meet them first.
What I do
Advisory
For the situation in front of you, or the pattern behind it.
Most of this work starts with one case that has become difficult. Someone has been off for months and nobody knows what to do next. A manager has handled a disclosure badly. An adjustment was agreed and quietly never happened.
I work with HR teams on reasonable adjustments and where the Equality Act actually bites, on capability and absence processes where mental health is a factor, on return-to-work planning that survives contact with the job, and on policies that read well but fail the person they are applied to.
- Case-level advice on live, difficult situations
- Reasonable adjustments and constructive knowledge
- Absence, capability and return-to-work processes
- Policy review — what happens, not what it says
Training and talks
For managers who will meet this whether they are ready or not.
Line managers are the ones who notice first and the ones who get it wrong first. Awareness campaigns do not help them, because the problem was never awareness. It is what to say on the Tuesday morning when someone tells them something serious.
Sessions are practical and specific to your setting. No role-play unless you want it. I use real scenarios, including ones where there is no good option, because those are the ones managers actually face.
- Suicide awareness and how to have the conversation
- Spotting distress early, and what to do next
- Bullying, its effects, and how it gets missed
- Half-day, full-day and conference formats
How I work
I tell you what I actually think
Including when the answer is that you have already made this hard to fix, or that the adjustment you are resisting is cheaper than the tribunal. You are not paying me to agree with you.
The person at the centre stays a person
Cases get discussed as risk. The employee is still someone whose job, income and health are on the line. Keeping that in view usually produces better decisions, not softer ones.
Short engagements are fine
Sometimes an hour on a call resolves it. I would rather do that and be useful than sell you a programme you did not need.
About me
I have worked in mental health in the UK for [X years], and I write about the ways work harms people and what employers can do differently.
I have also been on the other side of it. I was an employee whose health was damaged by work, and I left because staying was not survivable. That is not the pitch and it is not the whole story. But it is why I pay close attention to the gap between what a policy says and what happens to the person it is applied to.
Based in the UK. I work with organisations of most sizes, remotely or on site.
Get in touch
Tell me roughly what is going on. If I am not the right person I will say so, and point you somewhere better where I can.