Leon de Beer, SAFMH’s deputy director, spoke on 13 October at SADAG’s ask the expert discussion on understanding your mental health rights in the workplace.
Leon emphasizes: There’s no place in our current day society and organisations for any kind of disability discrimination.”
This includes discrimination based on your mental health condition. We need organisations to consider and implement reasonable accommodation.
Reasonable accommodation is any accommodation that is made to a person with a disability to enable them to perform optimally. For a wheelchair user, this would be ramps in the workplace. For persons with psychosocial disabilities, the built environment isn’t necessarily the problem, but we would look at organisational culture, and the willingness of managers to work in a human-rights based way to work with employees.” – Leon de Beer
When it comes to disclosure, Leon says that “there is no blueprint to it. This is an individualized decision. You need to decide if you want to disclose, how much you want to disclose, when you want to do it and what you want to say.”
Leon recommends this resource to help you further think through these questions.
You can watch the full discussion here .
Every Friday in October SADAG will be hosting an “Ask the Expert” discussion at 1PM via SADAG’s Facebook Page.
