The Importance of Allowing Mental Health Days
It is commonplace for workplaces and schools to allow a certain amount of sick days. After all, we’re only human, and are bound to get sick at least once throughout our work or school careers. It’s also considered normal for business owners to give their employees vacation time, to be used however employees would like.
What’s not so common however, is allotting mental health days to students and workers. Even for those who don’t suffer with any type of mental illness, it’s still normal - and human - to have days where you feel overwhelmingly sad, stressed, or unable to focus. Whether it’s life circumstances or just one of those days, struggles with mental health should be considered as important as issues with physical health. Unfortunately, even in 2022, it can feel like a radical act to allow days off solely for the purpose of nurturing one’s mental state.
Ideally, we would raise children with the notion that it’s okay, and even encouraged, to take care of yourself mentally. One way to do this would be to allow mental health days off from school. Currently, legislative action has been taken in 12 states to ensure that students are legally allowed to take days off from school for their mental health, and five more states have proposed bills for mental health days. Hopefully, more states will follow suit and these types of laws will become the norm.
For employees, it’s a little more complicated, but anyone who works for a company that has 50 or more employees or is under federal contract is legally protected from being penalized for taking time off for mental health reasons. Additionally, workers are protected from harassment or discrimination because of a mental health condition, and are legally allowed to ask their employers for reasonable accommodations. You can find out more on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s website.
It’s encouraging to see positive strides being made to protect mental health in the workplace and at schools, but we hope that these practices will become even more widespread in the years to come.