How do offshore industries support mental health issues?

Break your leg, you seek medical attention and you’ll probably get sympathy and support at work and socially. There will be an expectation that there will be a recovery time until that leg heals and you can return to duties.

Break your mind – with stress, anxiety, depression – you may seek medical attention and struggle for sympathy and support. Everyone can see a broken leg, but a broken mind is invisible, largely.

Offshore industries, as we all know, is male dominated and men, arguably, seem to have more problems with mental health and it is said that men don’t talk through these issues. They often feel embarrassment and shame and many refuse to seek help. When was the last time you saw a man (or woman) cry at work?

There are damning statistics too for the UK alone – male suicides total an average of 84 per week. That’s 4368 per year. Shocking isn’t it?

Offshore is no stranger to mental health risks. A report commissioned by the HSE and Oxford University pointed out the specific factors in this global field:

  • Physical and social isolation
  • Shift patterns
  • Anxiety at being separated from family 
  • Exhaustion 
  • Guilt
  • Confined spaces

Dr Lindsey Wright has some suggested solutions:

“The approach must move beyond the superficial tackling of symptoms and start looking at the embedded culture within the sector. For years, sub-contractor labour has led to a culture of presenteeism where being at work and earning has taken priority over wellbeing. An ability to mask feelings of anxiety and depression is developed that eventually reaches crisis point. After years of avoiding or suppressing these feelings it becomes much harder to address the root cause.”

At HSEQ-360 Ltd, we believe that conversations about mental health need to be normalised and start from the top. The stigma of anxiety and depression needs to be removed, so a man (or woman) can air concerns about their own and others’ well being knowing there will be concern and support. 

There may not be perceived space for wellbeing coaches and the like in offshore locations but support professionals and groups have emerged in recent years. An offshore worker needs to be physically and psychologically fit for arduous, demanding work and for them to remain so, companies must foster a culture that encourages employees to speak openly about stress, depression, anxiety.

Depression is a long-term, debilitating illness that causes the sufferer, their family and friends a lot of pain. There is no magic wand to cure it. In other fields of employment, a multi-faceted approach is used – CBT, EMDR, counselling and medication – to work out why this is happening, how best to manage it and support the person to recovery.

That figure of 84 men too is visually represented on an ITV tower block in London – 84 statues are perched at the top to remind us all that mental health and suicide is real and present every single day. 

The question for us, as offshore professionals, is how do we nurture a talking culture to support the many men and women who will suffer as a result of the nature of offshore work?

What do you think?