For eight years, Matt Price didn't take a single day off sick from his job as a head teacher at a Bristol primary school. But then the sleepless nights started, the work began to pile up and he was left feeling constantly exhausted and anxious.
"It was becoming impossible," he recalls. "The picture I have is of a circus act where you are juggling plates and there are just too many plates falling because you cannot get to them all. There were very long hours, 60-plus a week; a lot of evening work with meetings; and increasing amounts of my holidays were being taken up by work - tidying up from the previous term or preparing for the next one."
Price, now 52, was suffering clinical depression and, as World Mental Health Day tomorrow will remind us, he was an example of the one in four people who will have a mental health problem at some time in their lives. However, unlike many who find themselves permanently excluded from the workforce, Matt returned to the classroom, thanks to a pioneering scheme designed to help people with mental health problems hold on to their jobs.
The Avon Mental Health Job Retention Service is a pilot project which offers support to employees and their employers in getting people back to work. The individual receives counselling and practical advice from specialist workers and the employer is engaged in drawing up a back-to-work strategy. The service represents a new form of public-private partnership and is being backed by the Department of Health and the Department for Work and Pensions. Although the scheme is still in its infancy, there are tentative plans to extend it across the NHS in three years' time.
For Price, who has two grown-up children, the service was "a godsend". He was off work for nine months and never returned to his old school. However, support from job retention staff working for the Avon and Wiltshire Partnership NHS mental health trust means he is now able to work as a lecturer in a college of further education.
Regular meetings with his case worker provided an invaluable "safety net" for the first few months he was back at work, Price says. "He was always on the end of the phone and kept up the contact with me. He was like a mother hen in some ways. He'd put me in this new job and was very keen to see how I went and so we were in touch quite frequently about how I was doing."
It is still early days for the service, which is the result of a partnership between the NHS trust and Work Life Partnerships (WLP), a private, not-for-profit company which specialises in tackling mental stress in the workplace. The concept grew out of a work development programme set up by the trust, which is seen by the government as a beacon of excellence for its pioneering work in mental health.
Martin Jarritt is the chairman of WLP and knows from personal experience the devastation that mental illness can bring. Seven years ago, he was running a West End theatre in London and a hotel in Scotland when he found he was having severe problems sleeping.
"It was a very bad time financially - and I was very, very stressed," says Jarritt. "I was awake night after night after night. I was taking the kids to school in the morning on auto-pilot. I lost masses of weight. At one stage, I was sitting in the bath and clumps of my hair came out in my hands. I saw a GP who told me I was just stressed, but it wasn't until I saw another doctor that I was diagnosed as suffering from clinical depression."
He spent a month at a private Priory hospital, which specialises in stress and addiction, and resigned his jobs. But it took him at least six months to recover from the depression. He went on to study psychotherapy. "Without my partner I probably would not be here," he says. "I was lucky. I will fight like mad to get people the support they need."
Research has shown that help at an early stage is vital. Yet only a third of employees today have access to occupational health facilities - compared to half the workforce a decade ago. Moreover, official statistics show that one in five of the British workforce takes time off because of their inability to cope with the pressures of working life. Most return to the workplace, but 150,000 people a year end up with a chronic disability and join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. Bob Grove, director of the institute for applied health and social policy at King's College, London, says the cost to employees and employers is "enormous".
Grove, who is monitoring the project, says it comes at a critical time. "The government has put job retention high on its list of priorities and the health and safety executive has pledged to cut the number of stress-related absences from work by 20% over the next decade. At the same time, the NHS is looking for new ways of helping organisations restore and retain those who are struggling mentally in the workplace."
Support at these times is crucial and early intervention is the key to the new service, which revolves around the drawing-up of a back-to-work strategy by rehabilitation case workers. Under the scheme, stressful job tasks are identified and removed to allow the employee a less daunting return to work and improve the employer's chance of holding on to valuable staff. This may involve the setting up of telephone helplines; sports-style "wellness coaching", where the focus is on reaching career goals and a balanced personal life; and mediation and conciliation services. Companies will also be encouraged to sign up for risk assessments to discover what factors are causing stress in their workplace.
Employers, acutely aware of the need to retain qualified staff in an often tight labour market, are already taking an eager interest in the scheme. "Businesses realise that its very important to value staff and look after them," says Roger Hutchings, head of policy at Bristol's chamber of commerce.
"They know that mental illness can be stress-related and it is so important that they deal with it effectively. We've been surprised at the number of companies coming forward saying they have had highly valued, motivated employees with mental health problems - yet at the same time they have admitted they haven't been able to offer them any support. We believe the job retention service will fill that gap."
It is hoped that more than 100 companies in the south-west will sign up for the service during the first stage of the pilot. After paying a membership fee of £200, companies will have a mental health risk assessment of their workplace carried out and will be able to offer their employees a 24-hour helpline, which will provide counselling, advice and information.
Having access to this kind of support could make the difference between holding down your job and losing it, according to Price. "I would say to anyone: 'Use it sooner rather than later, get involved as soon as you can.' Everything my case manager said to me was extremely useful. From my own point of view, the service was invaluable."
· Matt Price is a pseudonym. Further information about the Avon job retention service, including details of a training seminar on November 18 and 19, on 0117-963 3681
