Part 2 of this mental health series provides advice on three tricky situations when managing people with mental health issues in the workplace: 1. How to balance your duty of care with your duty to manage performance; 2. How to decide how much empathy and negative consequences to direct to a person with a mental health issue who is causing harm to others; 3. How to deal with people with nasty personalities in the workplace. A key insight is that you ought to reduce your empathy towards people who are behaving badly and who have little or no insight into, or remorse about, their behaviour. Your empathy is then better directed at those around the person and towards yourself, protecting all of you from harm.
