My Choice: Developing a Workplace Disclosure Decision Aid and Resources for Working Parents of Children with Mental Health Disabilities

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Project Summary/Abstract Working parents of children with mental health disabilities (MHD) experience chronic stress linked to the unpredictable tasks associated with caring for a child with a disability and workplace flexibility practices. These contextual non-work factors contribute to increased loss of employment among this group of vulnerable workers. Courtesy stigmatization, defined as negative perceptions, and associated discriminating attitudes and behaviors projected towards family members of children with mental health disorders leads parents to carefully control the dissemination of their child's health information. Disclosure comes with threats to privacy and confidentiality, and the potential for discrimination and retaliation. Parents of children with MHD do experience discrimination and retaliation at work, such as being denied promotions and career opportunities or getting fired from their jobs because of public misperceptions related to the etiology of children's mental health1, 2. This can result in decisional conflict for parents of children with MHD regarding whether or not to disclose their child's mental health status to coworkers and supervisors. Disclosure to supervisors may provide parents of children with MHD access to needed flexibility and social support but it can also lead to discrimination, retaliation and job termination. Decisional conflict can exacerbate stress among this group of vulnerable workers, which can lead to lower job retention rates and chronic health issues. The objective of this proposal is to develop a workplace web-based, interactive decision aid, focused on giving employed parents of children with MHD knowledge and a process to reduce decisional conflict caused by contextual factors through (a) structured feedback on whether, what and when to disclose their disability-related care demands to their supervisor based on knowledge of risks, benefits and priority-setting activities that provides individualized feedback on disclosure preferences, and (b) resources supporting the highest ranked priority. Aim 1 will identify 4-5 contextual factors related to decisional conflict. Aim 2 develops a workplace web-based employee disclosure decision aid prototype, resources that incorporate organizational and managerial factors in the design. Aim 3 will pilot a web-based workplace employee disclosure decision aid and resources in a before-after study that will assess whether using the aid and resources reduces decisional conflict and stress among employees. The expected outcome of accomplishing the proposed objective is to develop a framework for, and prototype of, an individual level intervention for workers that will be paired with an organizational level intervention that targets leadership support to promote the health and well-being of vulnerable workers. This project is innovative, because develops and tests a workplace web application decision aid, and provides educational resources to parents of children with MHD, a group of workers whose needs are unmet by current occupational safety and health programs. The project aligns with Objective 7 of the National Occupational Research Agenda as it seeks to promote worker health and safety by conducting high impact workplace interventions that reduce worker illness and increase health and well-being by promoting a sustainable work-nonwork interface.