There are a whole lot of emotions the organization has to go through if there are employees with mental conditions that are not too obvious on the surface. This problem gets compounded when stress or depression causes you legal concerns. How are stress and depression connected to legal concerns?
It has to be accepted that stress or depression causes you legal concerns because organizations’ rules relating to work are spelt out in statutes and laws such as Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC).
Ignorance is not bliss
Stress or depression causes you legal concerns as a direct result of not knowing how to apply rules laid out by these statutes. For example, there is a great chance of stress or depression causing you legal concerns if an organization’s HR does not know how to identify people with these problems. When these problems are present among employees, they can influence and affect others at the workplace.
The way of treating such people in the organization is prescribed in these statutes. When an employee has stress or depression, it causes you legal concerns because such people have to be treated in accordance with what is mentioned in these laws. When HR fails to provide these employees the requisite medical or legal assistance, stress or depression can lead to legal concerns.
How to identify?
But there is a catch. How does HR know if employees it hires have problems that originate in in the mind? What if, at the time of the interview, if the candidate behaves like normally and there is very little to suggest that the person could have having issues like stress, depression, bipolar disorder or other kinds of personality disorders? Not everyone is expected to exhibit the type of behavior associated with these disorders at the time of the interview. Equally truly; no candidate is likely to announce the presence of such disorders at the time of the interview. Yet, stress or depression causes you legal concerns because it is the individual that is free to file lawsuits in such an event.
Knowing the law is important
So, HR has to explore ways of discovering that people with mental conditions are treated in accordance with the law. It has to ask for medical records of the candidate. This is in cases when it feels slightly suspicious about the candidate’s behavior. From the legal perspective too, it needs to understand the intricacies of these statutes. This is when it can free itself from stress or depression causing legal concerns.
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