Your feature on health and wellbeing rightly points out potential benefits for individuals and firms. However, I would also alert firms to the fact that this may not just be desirable, but also a commercial necessity; and not only for the reasons outlined in your feature.
Government policy is to shift health to the workplace for the general population. This is imperative as the NHS increasingly concentrates on core provision associated with an aging population. Already, councils and other public bodies must enshrine a ‘wellbeing strategy’ in all working practices. It is clear from policy documents that one carrot/stick for the private sector will be: no health and wellbeing strategy, no charter mark (there are two new ones); and more importantly, no public money.
The enlightened and imaginative law firm may already see the potential benefits, but the government (of whatever hue) will not be hanging around waiting for the unenlightened to catch up.
With regard to the individual, I agree with Andy Bell that depression and anxiety are probably the most common problems, exactly as they are in the general population. It follows, given that lawyers are people too, that the same treatments work as well for them as they do for any other person.
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the NHS’s evidence watchdog, recommends cognitive and behavioural therapy (CBT) as the most effective and researched mode of treatment across the range of psychological difficulties. CBT is just the clinical arm of applied psychology. As a self-help therapy, it holds no mystery because it is based on how we all think and process emotions. As a practitioner, I am also aware that a great deal of improvement in many cases comes simply from the application of some basic knowledge.
For practical help, may I suggest the free online self-help programme, ‘Living Life to the Full’, by the pioneering Professor Chris Williams and the University of Glasgow.
Dr Gerry Kearns, Thornton, Leicestershire
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