Since my employer has explicitly said taking mental health days as sick leave days is OK, hell yes I feel entitled to them, and I take a couple a year.
^ This.
Especially given how heavily customer-service/public-facing our jobs are where we work.
Yes, some people abuse this - there are ways to deal with that. But even the best employees have problems they need to deal with.
As long as it’s infrequent we can work around that.
My company doesn’t give sick leave or PTO - we still know that from time to time people will call off. If you’re feeling bad enough that you’re willing to lose a day’s pay then maybe you should take the day off. Again, assuming there is no abuse (if there is, the employee will become an ex-employee in accordance with the attendance policy).
I’m with Bashorian. I once worked for a company that offered two paid (non-accumulating) “mental health” days off each year. No advance notice required but (A) the employer asked /expected us not to be absent if something important was happening in the workplace; and (B) please call in to tell us you won’t be in.
It was a great idea and I used it two or three times over my multi-year employment span.
Better to just ask for the day off in advance and be honest that you’ve been working hard and just could do with a lie in, rather than pulling a last minute sickie on the day and leaving everyone in the shit. Much depends on the attitude of your boss and coworkers of course. It’s a bit broad a question.
If you’re needing mental health days often you need to find a job/lifestyle with a better balance for you.
If you can predict that in advance all the better. But if you wake up one morning and just need the day, take it. If management doesn’t have enough people to cover one taking a day off, that’s on them.
Haha, had to Google your user name to figure out what you meant.
To be fair, this does vary by job. If i had an appointment to see my doctor, (which often takes months to get) and he just cancelled on a whim, I’d be upset.
On the other hand, my job is the other extreme. It’s the unusual day when someone needs to cover for me. I always set up an out-of-office message that says whom to contact if you can’t wait for me to get back, but i can’t remember the last time anyone used that. My deadlines are measured in weeks, and my getting back to you tomorrow is almost always fine.
That’s the sort of thing I think is very situational - sure, if there aren’t enough people to cover one person taking one day off , that’s a staffing issue. But if it’s “Four people work in this office performing this function - one is on vacation, one is sick and a third just felt like taking the day off” , that’s not really a staffing issue. The person on vacation was planned for, the person who is sick couldn’t plan their illness ahead of time but the person who just didn’t feel like coming in could come in and planned to take a different day off - and while you can expect an employer to hire enough people to allow for vacations and illness , you can’t really expect them to hire 50% more staff than is usually necessary just so I can take a day off on no notice.
Most schools allow teachers a certain number of “personal days” per year, which by the terms of the contract can be used for exactly this sort of situation. But most teachers don’t take them, because it’s more work to take a day off than it is to just go in to work. At least, if you’re trying to do it properly: You could just leave plans for the sub telling them to make it a study hall, or grab the first random worksheet you find and telling them to pass that out (which amounts to the same thing, because most of those random worksheets take about five minutes to complete), but that’s not fair to the students. My contract covers what my obligations to my employer are, but that’s not the same thing as my obligations to my students.
I’d like to very much second this. And, also, my workplace has changed a lot since COVID. People are calling in sick with any symptom, and getting rapid COVID tests before coming in-- or not coming in at all, even with negative tests, if they a have fevers or coughs. If you are at all contagious, you will cause someone else to have to go get the test, even if it will also be negative.
In September, we got a letter from upstairs saying that we could be fired for insubordination for knowingly coming in after a positive COVID test, and we could be sent home, and told not to come back without getting tested if we came in with symptoms.
I work in a preschool, where parents sending kids in sick used to be a huge problem. Last year, we REALLY cracked down. Kids were getting sent home left and right for coming in with coughs and runny noses, including kids who developed them several hours into the day (so giving kids cold medicine in the morning and sending them wouldn’t work anymore). We eventually mostly got parents to stop. Some kids show up with a cough and a doctor’s note saying they are not contagious and can attend. We still sit them away from the other kids, even the older kids who are masked.
At any rate, people calling in for “mental health” is easier than it used to be, I imagine, because no one questions anyone who calls in sick since the “insubordination” letter.
It used to be that there was practically nothing that kept someone from coming in, because if you couldn’t find a sub, you really screwed the people in the class with you. Even if you did find a sub, if it was an unusual day, it could still be difficult without you.
People are more forward-thinking now; instead of thinking about the difficulty of the day, people think about the difficulty of the next several days if they pass something on.
At any rate, work is more stressful than it used to be, just beginning with wearing a mask for 7 hours. But I don’t think anyone is abusing calling in sick. The supervisor has hired an extra floater, and so far, everything is pretty smooth.
Our supervisor is doing a lot to make coming in more attractive, though-- she has been working hard to de-stress the environment, and compensate as much as she can for the fact that life in general is more difficult right now. She wants people to want to come in. Mostly, she’s been doing a pretty good job.
There’s everything from the cook putting out unserved food from lunch for teachers to make to-go boxes in case you don’t feel like cooking that night, to having drawings for store gift cards at staff meetings, to relaxations in the dress code. They also are letting people clock out during breaks if you want to do something like a Zoom appointment with your doctor. You don’t get paid (unless you take sick time), but you don’t lose the driving time. They’ll give you and empty room for privacy. You are already allowed to text or take short personal calls during break without clocking out, but now you can clock out to take longer, more involved ones.
So, there’s probably less motivation to take days off when there is not a pressing reason.
In my job, that wouldn’t be a problem. We do try to have one person on the team available in case there’s an urgent question (although i expect there will be some days between Christmas and New years when that might not be true) but if six of the seven of us are off on the same day, it is very unlikely to inconvenience our customers. So long as our work gets done and our deadlines are met, the precise timing is pretty flexible.
A couple times a year i have to present to senior management or something, and I’d have to be pretty freaking sick to take those days off. (I can present remotely if I’m slightly sick) but that’s a very small fraction of my days.
My wife is a classroom aide at a public school, and this is still a big problem.
We no longer keep symptomatic kids in the classroom until the parents can come and get them, and no longer ignore the situation if it is close to the end of the day.
Now, we remove a symptomatic child to a separate room, where they are with just one adult, and possibly other symptomatic children, but distanced, with barriers; they can’t play together. They have toys, and whatever crafts or things their class is doing, and a cot to lie on if they are feeling bad, but they aren’t with their familiar teacher, and not getting comforted, other than verbally, because we can’t hug symptomatic kids.
It’s not punishment; it’s safety, but to the kid, it feels like punishment, and the parent knows it. So now parents are much less likely to send a sick child in the first place, and get there fast to pick up a sick one if one does happen to get sick at school.
That’s part of what I meant by situational - some jobs are like yours and others are like the one I partially described , where we often didn’t have deadlines, but rather had tasks that had to happen on a certain day. Not earlier, not later. Some were appointments with clients but not all.
At my school, we’re not told details for reasons of medical confidentiality, but I’m seeing a lot of cases where a student is “Absent-Excused” for a week in a row, followed by a day of “Partial absence-Excused: Dismissed 8:45 AM”, followed by a few more “Absent-Excused”. Clearly, the parents are trying to send the kid back to school before they’re fully recovered, and it’s coming to light quickly and they’re getting sent back home.
A sick day to me also means personnel wellness day.
I’ve taken one in the last two years because I didn’t sleep well.
Now this is a LOT different for different kinds of jobs. I understand that. I do take sick days to take care of my Mom about 2 times a month. They are cool with that.
Note that I have been working the same job for 30 years. Well, the job has changed a lot. I have hundreds of hours of sick time saved up.
Working form home now, I don’t really feel I can take a sick day. I’m available and let the team know I am. And since most people are masking up, and I’m working from home, I haven’t had a cold in 2 years.
Sometimes you don’t get advanced notice.
In my current job I need to give two weeks notice in order to get a particular day off. Just too bad that I didn’t get advance notice last month about the week when three people I know all died and a fourth received a cancer diagnosis. Although I did not take a mental health day I did consider it as it all happened over about four days and really piled up on me.
Or actual mental health treatment. But I think most of us are not talking about frequent absence but rather a rarity. At least that’s what I’m talking about.
Yeah. Well she’s not going to have the opportunity to be 22 with a free trip to Europe forever. The job market will be there when she gets back.
I was thinking more along the lines of if your employer feels you are so critical to a role that no one else can do it, the flip side of that they should be treating you better.
In my opinion, employers can’t win on this one. A Youtuber has a video about how she left her job as an international lawyer (all the minimalists used to make six figures) because they asked her to complete a high-value assignment despite her grandpa being in the hospital due to deadlines. When she explained her family situation, her boss pointed out that this is why she made $200k/year with a $50k clothing allowance and traveled on private jets and helicopters all over the world, right out of law school. It’s less about how people are treated or valued, and often just about what they want in that moment.