Poor Work

A national work-life balance survey carried out by the charity has found that workers frequently sacrifice activities that are vital to their mental health in order to work longer hours. The activities most frequently sacrificed are exercise (48%), quality time with partner (45%), time with friends and social activities (42%), and hobbies/entertainment (41%). Crucially, these are all areas that are known to promote good mental health and relieve mental health problems when they occur. 61% of employees have experienced a negative consequence in their personal life due to working longer hours.

Evidence shows that exercise is extremely effective in helping people ward off and recover from depression. Personal and social relationships are also known to be vital. Loneliness and isolation are often major contributing factors in mental health problems.

The survey also found that, as people's working hours increase, so do the number of leisure hours they devote to thinking or worrying about work. Working longer hours left more than half of respondents feeling irritable, a quarter anxious and a third depressed. A number reported specific mental health problems, including attempted suicide, as a direct result of pressure at work.

The charity launched Whose Life is it Anyway?, a report on the effects of the UK's long hours work-culture on mental health, as part of Mental Health Action Week. This follows a raft of new legislation to ensure a better work-life balance for parents.

In the two years since the Prime Minister launched the work-life balance campaign, the number of people working more than 60 hours a week rose from one in eight to one in six. The number of women working these hours more than doubled over the same period.

It is estimated that nearly three in every ten employees will experience a mental health problem in any one year, and that mental health problems account for the loss of more than 91 million working days each year, with half of these due to anxiety and stress conditions.

Dr Andrew McCulloch, Chief Executive of the Mental Health Foundation said: "The new family-friendly legislation is very welcome, but work-life balance goes wider and deeper than this. We work the longest hours in Europe in this country. While people with young families are rightly being encouraged to address their work-life balance, our survey shows that there are many others out there who are carrying enormous burdens."

"Many studies have examined the costs to industry of our long hours work culture in terms of stressed employees, through lower productivity and working days lost. Our research is designed to look at the costs to individuals. The individual stories we collected as present a picture of loss on a large scale. Many people who took part in the survey documented relationship and marriage breakdown, loss of friendship, poor relationships with children, and nearly a fifth of people had left or lost jobs due to overwork."

"As a nation we're working long and hard to improve our standard of living, but in the process we're in danger of losing our capacity to enjoy it."

The Mental Health Foundation is calling on:

-Individuals, to take personal responsibility for their work-life balance, which means speaking up when work expectations and demands are too much;
-Employers, to encourage a culture of openness about time constraints and workload. Employees must feel able to speak up if the demands placed on them are too great;
-The Government to set up an independent agency to modernize industrial practice across the UK.