A manager once asked me why one of his best engineers had gone quiet. The man had not complained to anyone. He had not taken a single day of medical leave. He arrived on time, cleared most of his work, and told his supervisor he was fine.
But he had stopped speaking in meetings, stopped offering the ideas that had made him worth hiring, and started making small mistakes that were not like him. A few months later he resigned. The company never worked out why it had lost him.
I see a version of this in workplaces almost every week. It rarely looks like a crisis. It looks like a good worker slowly going flat.
This is not a rare problem. Malaysia’s National Health and Morbidity Survey found that about one million adults now live with depression, roughly double the number recorded in 2019.
More than half of working Malaysians report high levels of work-related stress. Many of those people are, at this moment, sitting at a desk or standing on a line, doing their jobs and saying nothing.
We have grown comfortable talking about mental health at work. Most companies now hold a wellness talk or two, put up a poster for World Mental Health Day, and share a hotline number.
These are not bad things. But they are not the same as knowing whether the work itself is making people unwell, and they do very little for the engineer who is quietly drowning while still hitting his targets.
That gap, between talking about mental health and actually measuring it, is what has now changed in Malaysia.
In 2024, the Department of Occupational Safety and Health introduced guidelines that treat psychosocial risk as a workplace hazard, in the same way we already treat noise, chemicals and dust.
The framework, known as PRisMA 2024, expects employers to identify and manage the features of work that harm mental health: unmanageable workloads, little control over one’s own tasks, weak support from managers, unclear roles and job insecurity.
This is a real shift, and many employers have not absorbed it yet. Mental health at work is no longer only a matter of goodwill or branding. It is something an employer is now expected to assess, record and act on.
The word assess is the one that matters. A wellness survey asks people whether they feel happy. A psychosocial risk assessment is a different exercise.
Using a validated instrument such as the LEO26 screen, it measures specific, known drivers of harm across a workforce, team by team, and compares them against an established threshold.
It tells an employer not that morale is low in general, but that a particular unit is carrying a particular kind of risk that needs a particular response. It is closer to a hearing test than to a suggestion box.
Some employers will say they cannot afford to open this box. The figures say the opposite. One widely cited estimate put the cost of workplace mental health problems in Malaysia at RM14.46 billion in 2018, close to one per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Globally, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimate that depression and anxiety cost about 12 billion working days, and close to a trillion US dollars, every year.
Almost none of that appears as a line in anyone’s budget. It appears as a silent epidemic that affects our best performers.
There is also a duty here that goes beyond money. When a person spends the better part of their waking life at work, the conditions of that work are not a private matter. If those conditions are grinding people down, an employer who has never looked cannot honestly say they did not know.
So this is a direct request to employers. Stop treating mental health as a poster campaign, and start treating it as what the guidelines now consider it to be: a workplace hazard you are responsible for managing.
You already accept that duty for noise, for chemicals, for machinery. Extend it to the mind. Bring in a registered psychosocial-trained person, carry out a proper psychosocial risk assessment, look honestly at what it shows, and fix the parts of the work that are harming your people.
This does not ask you to become a mental health expert. It asks you to look, with the right tools, and to act on what you find.
The engineer who went quiet did not need a poster. He needed someone to notice, early, that the work was costing him more than he could say.
Malaysia has now written that expectation into how workplaces are meant to run. The employers who step up will keep their best people. The ones who keep treating mental health as a slogan will keep losing them, and keep wondering why.
The author is an occupational health doctor.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
