First, "sick days" generally are a policy for handling acute disorders; e.g. last week I didn't have disease X, today I do, and next week I'll be healthy again. You can't "wait out" a mental disease; taking a day or two off may reduce elevated stress levels but that is not the disease, the underlying problems aren't going to be solved when you come back.
The second issue is that many common physical issues are contagious, and there's a strong benefit for the employer and the society for sick people to "quarantine" themselves instead of going to offices and infecting coworkers and customers.
Mental diseases generally all are chronic and not contagious, and so they're similar in workplace (mis)treatment to things like arthritis or diabetes complications; things that don't map neatly to "x days to get cured" but instead need ongoing maintenance and unscheduled downtime forever.
In the UK time off to manage a long term condition could be justified as a "reasonable adjustment" under the equality act.
I am a proponent of taking time off for mental health, but I have to nitpick here. Medically speaking, physical illness is different from mental illness. One is diagnosed from objective scientific tests (pathology) while the other is not.
[1] Source: medical school. Not finding a study with exact numbers from a quick search. [2] https://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v23/n1/full/nm.4246.html
There are objective tests for all of these pathologies, though those tests are often inconclusive in the face of the symptoms.
>If you don't think there's a physical basis for mental illnesses though, skim through the figures in this article[2] for a prime example of the ways modern medicine is disproving that.
There are physical symptoms of mental illness, but as yet there is no proof of physical causes, which is why the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and the DSM-4 stated "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests". You'll find no objective biological tests in the DSM.
Nothing good, sadly.
My wife was in banking for twelve years and worked her way up from a teller to a fairly senior position. Her work ethic was spectacular - she had just two sick days in the previous five years and she was promoted almost yearly, always receiving an excellent review.
A few years ago, she went from having occasional discomfort to waking with fairly severe pain daily. It got so bad that she had to take time off, and eventually took FMLA for a full twelve weeks to see if it would help. It didn't and she was fired soon after.
She filed for disability after being diagnosed with Fybromyalgia. Our lawyer sent her to bother specialist doctors and independent testing labs to get complete documentation. They had her complete various tasks like screwing in a screwdriver, raising a weight above her head for X seconds etc. and then asked her to rate her pain levels and other self-reported things.
In the end, she was denied for disability, mostly because disability is no longer about actually being disabled - it's now about essentially filling the gap between welfare and medicaid. In the written opinion however, the stated reason was that all the evidence was self-reported, implying she could be making it all up (because who wouldn't want to give up a successful and lucrative career for some minimal-level disability payments).
Anyway, I learned two main things:
1. There are no commonly accepted objective tests for pain - it's almost all self-reporting.
2. The disability system in the US is heavily used as supplemental welfare.
No, objective tests are in these cases used to exclude other causes to the symptoms, not to diagnose the mentioned illnesses. These are diagnoses of exclusion[1].
> There are physical symptoms of mental illness, but as yet there is no proof of physical causes, which is why the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine and the DSM-4 stated "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests". You'll find no objective biological tests in the DSM.
I'm not disputing the fact that it's not possible to do pathophysiological tests for mental illnesses in current clinical practice, but you're creating a false equivalence by implying that being unable to test for a pathophysiological factor is the same as that factor not existing. There are plenty of pathophysiological changes that occur in mental illnesses [2-4], but for obvious reasons it's not feasible to haphazardly take biopsies of the brain to test for them, especially when the patient history and subjective examinations suffice to make a diagnosis in most cases.
Conversely, my point still stands that the vast majority of somatic illnesses are diagnosed off subjective symptoms - doctors don't bother doing objective lab tests for a cold or a sprained ankle when the diagnosis is glaringly obvious based off subjective symptoms.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis_of_exclusion
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanisms_of_schizophrenia#Pathophysiology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_of_depression
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophreniaIt is feasible post mortem but scientists still have no conslusive proof from such examinations.
>Conversely, my point still stands that the vast majority of somatic illnesses are diagnosed off subjective symptoms - doctors don't bother doing objective lab tests for a cold or a sprained ankle when the diagnosis is glaringly obvious based off subjective symptoms.
That is not in dispute because a cold and sprained ankle are objectively diagnosable post mortem. Mental illness is not.
Oh, and you kind of can diagnose certain mental illnesses post mortem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181616/
No ones knows for sure because no one can objectively explain the nature of consciousness and the mind in the first place. That is of course not to say that chemicals do not have a strong influence on the mind.
>Oh, and you kind of can diagnose certain mental illnesses post mortem: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181616/
The study has no control group and therefore is not objective. If you read the Methodological Issues section, you'll see that this is essentially a study of the neurochemical effects of antipsychotic drugs.
True, but I'm still waiting for a single proposal as to where a mental illness would subside other than physical structures/molecules, because the only other explanation I can think of are in the realm of the metaphysical
> The study has no control group and therefore is not objective. If you read the Methodological Issues section, you'll see that this is essentially a study of the neurochemical effects of antipsychotic drugs.
The article isn't a study/original research, it's a review based off of existing research - generally - in which brains from individuals with schizophrenia are compared to the brains of individuals without schizophrenia (controls). Antipsychotic drugs as a confounding factor is definitely an important factor in these studies though. There are however a number of factors that are are not affected by antipsychotics, notably genetics[1, 2]. Certain genetic variants strongly increase the risk of mental illnesses - by what mechanism does this work other than by translating to proteins that exert an objective, physical effect? (Note that studies on this are primarily GWAS based on large populations, not simple hereditary/familial studies in which one could argue that environmental factors were confounding)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_schizophrenia#Genetics
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bipolar_disorder#GeneticIsn't this just because we don't actually understand medical illnesses nearly as well as we understand physical ones in general? I don't we actually know that there is anything innate about mental illness that makes it different from physical illness in this sense. That being the case, mental illnesses are just like those physical illnesses that we have yet to understand as well no?
Please correct me if I'm misinformed as this is a topic that I am very interested in.
These tests take a measurement and based on peer-reviewed statistical studies make a determination as to whether or not the measurement falls into a pathological range.
This is exactly the same as measuring blood pressure or cholesterol. You read a number and decide if there is a statistically valid correlation between that number and an identified disease.
Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
Objective: (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.
What is the difference between being schizophrenic and having the "opinion" that Satan speaks to you through your neighbor's cat?
Mental illness is defined by what a person feels and believes.
What you feel and believe is subjective but you can objectively establish that a particular cluster of subjective feelings and beliefs is abnormal vis-a-vis a populate.
Then when you ask people the same questions and their cluster of responses fits the abnormal definition you can objectively say that they have a mental illness.
The objectivity does not come from the doctor observations or patient self-survey, it comes from the study that created the questions and proved that a certain score or cluster of responses is statistically abnormal.
Honestly, a lot of the time it comes down to observable impact. If a patient comes to a doctor and says that they feel depressed, that's one thing, if they have lost their third job this year because they can't do anything but lie in bed and seem to not care about their own lives (especially if they used to not be like this in the past) that's something else.
How do you objectively verify "manic"? You can track hours slept. No one fakes sleeping two hours a day for a month while having, say, good motor skills in the daytime.
This matters because recurring brief hospitalization is necessary for some people to get back on their axis. This is NOT "sanity days" or "mental healing", it's a clear cut medical issue.
Not all “physical” (the term is not really the correct distinction, since all illness, including mental illness, is physical) illness is diagnosed directly in that manner (not all physical illness can be, because not all is understood well enough to have definitive tests, and it's not always clinical practice to do so even when it is possible in principle.) And, on the other side, some psychiatric conditions have lab tests of the same sort available.
Which ones?
"psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests" -Allen Frances
See, e.g., http://www.thedailybeast.com/can-a-blood-test-diagnose-menta...
>Diagnosis is based on observed behavior, the person's reported experiences, and reports of others familiar with the person...As of 2013 there is no objective test. [5]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
Edit: the source you edited in simply states the corollary to what I've been saying all along: that scientists are still searching for a biological test for mental illness but as yet still do not have one
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-brain-scans-d...
I'm sympathetic, but don't make the discussion worse by throwing falsehoods like this around.
Besides the fact expressed by others that physically illness is more diagnosable, you typically don't get mentally ill from being in proximity to a mentally ill person. (At least, I never have.)
Physical illness is a different situation. That's why my workplace offers near unlimited sick time for this reason. As much as we'd love you have to working, we don't want your diseases.
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(Granted, having an anxiety attack in the middle of work may not do wonders for the mental state of your coworkers, but blithey asserting this "no different" is dubious at best.)
You also don't get physically ill from being in proximity to someone with a non-contagious disease or a sprained ankle, so that's an irrelevant distinction.
Sick days are not just for flus and colds that are contagious...
Agreed. I meant to mention that.
> so that's an irrelevant distinction.
Flus and colds are by far the most common uses of sick days, so I wouldn't say it's "irrelevant."
Contagious diseases (and, a fortiori, those that are contagious on casual contact) are a distinct subset of so-called “physical” illness.
You don't get cancer from being in proximity to someone with cancer, either.
The disease itself is a delusion, regarding microscopic fibers in the skin. Sufficiently impressionable people simply hear about it, convince themselves that they have it, then they go on to try to convince others that it is a physical ailment rather than a mental illness.
If you are politically incorrect enough to classify religions as mental illnesses, many of those appear to be contagious as well.
But on a smaller scale, workplace morale is definitely infectious. If someone is having a particularly stressful day, they may be rude to someone else, who then feels worse as a result, and may propagate that to yet another co-worker. Of particular interest is that such transmission need not take place in person. A person with a common cold could work from home to keep everyone else from catching it, but someone with malaise or anxiety could transmit that via any medium that can include emotional undertone, such as a voice or video call.
Enter the Internet. Now all the susceptible people can aggregate around their own forums/boards/podcasts/groups/subreddits and infect each other with their unique strains of madness.
There's no more herd immunity, because all the susceptible people can find each other instantly.
In the sense that you can go to a doctor, get diagnosed, get treatment, get that treatment paid for by an insurance company and get legal protections under laws applying to health care they are "no different."
Since we are talking about how corporate HR policies apply to mental health and not the philosophy of medicine I would argue that these are the similarities that actually matter.
I tend to agree with you, but the concept of "contagion" is widely used in mental health settings. Self harm, or suicidality, can be "contagious".
Waiting until the worst happens isn't sustainable and just makes things harder to recover. Perhaps burnout isn't just simply mental but a larger, systemic degradation of the body.
Mental illness does not have to be severe just as physical illness does not have to be severe.
Sick leave policies typically only require a doctors note/visit if you are absent for multiple days.
Taking a single day off for mild mental illness, something like elevated stress levels causing anxiety that interrupts your sleep, seems perfectly consistent with most of the corporate sick leave policies I have read.