As we marked Mental Health Day on October 10, I have been asked several times about mental health issues in the workplace and specifically about how they are caused.

Which is a strange question. The answer to that is "life," and it is interpreted differently for each of us.

But the question is a valid one, as personnel management is a key function in every organisation and a function that concerns all managers.

l was taught early on the wisdom of starting off by looking to find the human weaknesses – the illnesses we all are subject to.

Managers are, first of all, human beings just like workers, subject to the same emotional and physical strains.

Secondly, mental health is often a problem for normal human beings, as physical health is. Most people will suffer from memory loss or an attack of anxiety as often as they will get the flu, affecting both managers and employees equally.

There are longer-lasting and often chronic mental health problems, such as the loss of a relationship that leaves a big, silent hole in a person’s life and can develop into a loss of self-confidence or fear of other people – a social dysfunction that will affect work performance and may need attention and even therapy, as do physical ailments like arthritis.

A manager may not know how to help, but using the company’s EAP and seeing a therapist does.

I have seen people’s careers ruined when similar mental problems block their chances of promotion to a leadership role.

They can affect a person's mental state, from being mild to traumatic, from being tolerable to inconvenient, where they disturb other employees, may be dangerous and must be dealt with professionally. Often such illnesses are covered by assistance from company medical and sickness plans. Employees whose lives and performances are affected should seek help from HR or, as my father, a country doctor, advised: "If you have a toothache, go to a dentist."

If you have depression, go to a counsellor.

As my coach told me, "First check if there is a physical issue...it might be a kidney problem or a hormonal imbalance, which can affect any employee at work, and often does."

There are also rare mental health problems employees may have arising out of other people’s psychological and mental problems which may affect them, such as psychopathy or sadism, a compelling impulse to cruelty, which Dr MS Peck exposed in the New England Journal of Medicine.

When I was doing my master’s degree in education in Canada, the instance of sadism as a personality factor, which behavioural statisticians claimed appeared in one-ten per cent of professional teachers and medical personnel, surprised me. As far as I know, those statistics are not kept in TT, but people note it exists – in the bullying now openly displayed both in our classrooms and in offices.

In theory, it was claimed to be at least partly in response to the relatively powerless status bullies hold in relation to their own abusive parents, and later as employees, in the face of bullying supervisors. The psychic