Attitudes of human resources professionals towards mental health

Abstract

This study tries to explore the attitudes of Human Resources professionals towards mental health and individuals with mental health issues. It looks into the extent of the stigma towards individuals with mental health problems on recruitment, likelihood of reasons for which these people struggle more to find employment and the extent of strategies that HR professionals have to take care of their employees’ mental health. A quantitative methodology was used, were 169 participants completed an online questionnaire. Nonparametric tests, namely, Mann-Whitney U Test and Spearman’s rho correlation coefficient were used to test the hypotheses. A significant relationship was found between how comfortable one is employing someone who has anxiety and gender and also between how comfortable one is employing someone who has depression and gender, with males being significantly higher. Results indicate that more males than females admitted that they did not employ an individual because of their mental illness. Most of the participants (63.3%) believe that employees should disclose their mental illness while only 19% believed that employees should disclose previous mental health problems that are no longer present. The results of the study are discussed with regard to previous literature and recommendations are made for future research such as looking into the experience of employers who have previously hired individuals with mental health issues.