Supporting an Employee with Personal Struggles: How Can We Help and Protect Our Team?

Dear Friends, we are a startup IT organization, and we have an employee who is experiencing personal life issues. Because of this, he is having thoughts of committing suicide. We repeatedly asked him whether it is work-related, and he denied it, saying it is purely due to personal life issues. Given the situation, we have decided to do the following:

1. Encourage him to get professional help.
2. Allow him to work from home as much as he needs.
3. Permit him to work remotely from his parents' or in-laws' place outside of the city where our office exists.

The above items are documented in emails. Is there anything else we need to do apart from the above items to protect ourselves if something goes wrong in the future? Of course, the first objective is to prevent any unfortunate event. What can we, as a company, do to prevent any unfortunate event since it is purely due to personal life issues?

Thank you,

Amar

You have almost done everything right operationally. However, I request you to get an appointment with a psychiatrist at your earliest convenience. Please don't leave it to him. More importantly, keep an aide around him. He wouldn't want to be watched. Hence, a trustworthy companion who helps him open up is a must. Family support is good, if only he opens up to them.

The best part is, he has already expressed his intentions. Hence, we can help him. Mostly, such individuals keep everything secret until they act on it. We managed a similar case with a former employee. Our employee didn't share anything, but thankfully we were able to provide assistance. Within an hour, the necessary help was rendered, and those pills were taken. It required a mammoth effort in building trust. In due course, everything returned to normal.

Create a nurturing environment and watch him grow. Wishing you all the best!

Please approach Samadhana Counselling Centre. A counsellor will come to the employee's home. This is a social service, and no charges need to be paid. The website is as follows: http://samadhana.in <link updated to site home>

About Dr. Chandrasekhar: He runs the counselling centre in a very organized manner. Counsellors are trained, given probation, and then put on the job of counselling. Since this is a social service, counsellors do not take any charges. Dr. Chandrasekhar has done a yeoman's job in settling familial or social conflicts in society. Not many in society provide this type of selfless service.

All the best!

Dinesh V Divekar

Hi all, thank you very much for the response. Yes, we have arranged a session with a professional counseling center. By the way, I couldn't access http://samadhana.in/. Maybe the website is temporarily down. Again, thank you very much for guiding us with the issue. For the benefit of others, I'll keep you posted about the progress.

Thank you,
Amar

Dear Amar, I have a few issues to share with you.

Assessing Work-Related Stress

First of all, honestly ask yourself and your colleagues to rule out any possibility of work-related issues that could be the primary causes of his present predicament or state of mind.

Evaluating Work-from-Home Solutions

Do you really think allowing him to work from home would relieve him of this phobia or menace? What if he aggravates this ill feeling and goes to the extreme, as you feared? I strongly feel a comprehensive psychiatric diagnosis associated with suitable therapy could cure him.

Side by side, someone close to him should try to ascertain what could be the reason(s) resulting in his present state of mind.

The positive suggestions of (Cite Contribution) and Kumar, along with the quick response of Dinesh for counseling, are appreciable. I also concur with Kumar that permitting the employee to work from home may not be beneficial. I don't know what psychology says about suicide, but in my personal view, suicide is not a sudden decision made by a depressed person in a moment of impulse. It is a strong tendency to destroy something detestable that has been holed up in the subconscious for a long time, emerging as self-destruction or suicide. One of the factors triggering the tendency to suicide is loneliness. I think all your proactive and preemptive actions, including the suggestions offered, are more than sufficient.

An employer cannot police an employee with an estranged personal life around the clock.