Engage mental health professionals: HRMAB president

ONE Human Resource practitioner is strongly encouraging employers to engage with mental health professionals in order to look after the mental health of their employees.

Brittany Brathwaite, President of the Human Resources Management Association of Barbados (HRMAB), highlighted this as she spoke during the 2020 Domestic Financial Institutions Conference Virtual Series, titled “The Psychosocial Impact of COVID-19”, which was hosted by the Central Bank of Barbados and HRMAB.

She revealed that throughout the world and interviews done by persons who would have spoken anonymously to the press, there was a common concern that persons had an overwhelming fear when it came to returning to work.

“I think the approach to managing this fear that we have seen, particularly through the surveys that we have done at our HRMAB membership, etc., is that a lot of business owners and practitioners are reiterating and practising the national protocols, but the one thing that I think is missing and we have to use more often are mental health professionals,” she said.

“I by no stretch of the imagination am a trained psychologist; I don’t know how to manage mental health issues, I don’t. That’s not my sphere of expertise and I think that we need to acknowledge very much when we are dealing with this concept of fear, and the reintegration into work that many of us who are trying to manage this fear. We are not equipped with what we need in order to manage this fear.

“So even if we have shared the protocols and told them that they are safe and fine, a lot of people are dealing with more trauma than we can imagine.”

She noted that while it may be easy to categorise the trauma persons are experiencing as fear, she had reason to believe that it was more than that.

Brathwaite expressed that it was certainly beyond the scope of employers, in many cases, to tackle with and truly understand what persons were dealing with. So it is against this backdrop that she believed it was important for employers and employees to engage with mental health professionals, whether in a group setting or individually, to deal with the issue and not “castigate persons to simply being conspiracy theorists”.