Getting help with an absence from work due to WRS

Introduction

Getting help before the stress of teaching becomes acute is essential and a wealth of useful information about teachers' well being is available from the Teacher Support Scotland.

What you are trying to achieve is 'Wellbeing', a personal feeling of what is right for you .  It cannot be given to you but you can be given the 'tools' to achieve it .  An individual's wellbeing can be affected by a number of of factors such as physical environment and resources, the ability to make a difference and control of your life and decisions.

Your achievement of wellbeing is partly shown by your ability to be able to relax, defined as being the state in which physical muscle tension is released and mental tension is minimal.  WRS is a state in which neither of these conditions occur, leading to exhaustion and psychological injury. 

Recovery from WRS  invariably takes a long time; measured in months or years rather than days or weeks.  Full recovery is actually quite rare and this is why the condition needs to be taken very seriously by all staff, including senior management teams and Local Authorities.

To reduce the present upsurge in WRS cases, fundamental changes need to be made to the lifestyle of many Scottish teachers through reducing workload, changing location or even changing jobs.  Most people recognise that stress comes in episodes, but what is not so commonly appreciated is that stress is usually cumulative and may eventually trigger WRS, resulting in 'long term' absence from work and all that this entails. 

Employers often portray stress as an individual problem rather than one affecting the whole of the workforce in an establishment and they sometimes attempt to justify this by claiming that an individuals stress is being caused by factors outside of work, such as noisy neighbours, relationship problems etc.  This ignores the established 'truism' that work is still one of the main causes of stress.

Research shows that employers are generally not overly sympathetic when stress from outside of work is in fact a problem, therefore compounding the severity of the stress by not reacting to it in a caring fashion.  This leads to employees not confiding personal problems and the chances of long term absence due to severe stress increase as they become more vulnerable to work-related stress.  The result almost inevitably being that the employer needlessly loses the contribution of that individual to the overall work output of the establishment.

Stress results in the release into the bloodstream of the hormone cortisol and long periods of stress have been shown to cause clinical depression due to the cumulative effects of this hormone.

Symptoms of Stress:

• Stress is the reaction people have when the demands placed on them are not matched by their ability to cope; or
• Stress is when your mouth says 'yes, whilst your guts are screaming no!'

The Three Recognised Stages of stress are:

Stage 1 - speeding up, talking too quickly, working at high speed without tiring, eating and drinking faster.

Stage 2 - irritability, gastric symptoms, tension, headache and migraine, insomnia, loss of energy, using 'comfort tricks' such as alcohol, smoking, excessive sweating, unusually slow recovery from minor illness, etc.

Stage 3 - 'cotton wool headache', gastric ulceration, chest pains, cardiac incident, depression and anxiety, physical or mental breakdown, tiredness and lack of energy.

In order that people may be happy in their work, they need three things: to be fit for it, not to do too much of it and they must have a sense of success in it.

John Ruskin 1851

Please note that the information on these pages is drawn from a wide variety of sources and does not reflect the views of any one specific professional association, support network, etc.