The heading of this article may appear little dramatic but the facts and figures are not because 24 suicides and more than 13 attempted cases by France Telecom employees have been reported since beginning of 2008.(1)

"Workplace stress" is the harmful physical and emotional responses that can happen when there is a conflict between job demands on the employee and the amount of control an employee has over meeting these demands. In general, the combination of high demands in a job and a low amount of control over the situation can lead to stress.(2)

According to a study by The Work Foundation, nearly a third of working men say that the demands of their job interfere with their private life and nearly a quarter feel that their work has caused them to neglect their children.(3)

In one my article published here recently - somewhat similar to the current topic - i categorically mentioned that "the most devastating demand-supply mismatch of Need Vs Time & Energy allocation for essential activities in Professional and Personal life, and often with life threatening consequences due to stress related diseases - is what Work-Life imbalance actually means.(4)

I also said that "maintaining an equilibrium among important priorities in your life is very difficult to achieve in practice, but not impossible, if you are willing to do justice to yourself - for both personal growth and professional achievements - as well as to your family members."(4)

Remembering sadly the incident of an young employee of software major committing suicide because he was not able to adjust and perform according to the expectations of the management, I wrote an article here - appealing to others in similar situation for developing stress bearing abilities.(5)

As mentioned there, if by some means, we are able to check the past 'behavioral response' of those victims - may be through a systematic information collection mechanism from their near and dear ones,' i am sure, a similar background of "unique stress reaction" would emerge.

And it would be an additional responsibility for the Human Resource dept to identify and monitor behavioral responses of those professionals, as work pressure will continue to build-up in future and many more such cases are likely to happen.

You can bear more stress, if you make yourself much stronger - both physically and mentally, and how to do that has been explained in details in an article published on helpguide.(6)

You have to accept what you can not change and change yourself to suit it, which you surely can, because you have in-built abilities to do so, otherwise Darwin's "Theory of Evolution" would have been dumped long ago.

2) CCOHS

3) Bupa

4) LAN

5) LAN

6) helpguide