Brighton has the second highest proportion of people who have taken time off work with stress, according to a survey.
Some 37 per cent of people living in the Brighton area said that they had had time off for stress.
Plymouth topped the stress table, with 39 per cent of respondents saying that they had, according to the Censuswide survey on behalf of the insurer Aviva.
The company said: “A quarter of people (25 per cent) surveyed admitted taking a day off work with stress but then blamed it on a physical illness.
“Based on the current number of people working in the UK, it indicates that almost eight million people are suffering in silence.”
Aviva’s research suggested that one in three people (33 per cent) had taken a day off work with stress at some stage in their career.
The 25 to 34-year-old age group was the most likely to have taken time off (46 per cent) with over 55s seemingly the least likely to need time away from work (25 per cent).
More than half of men (53 per cent) who had taken a day off work with stress at some stage in their career said that they had done so in the past year, compared with just a third of women (34 per cent).
Those who have needed time away from work with stress in the past year took an average of six days off although the most commons response was one to two days (31 per cent).
Six per cent of those who needed time away from work in the past year said that they had taken 11 days or more.
The research was carried out to coincide with National Stress Awareness Day last week. It was on Wednesday 2 November.
The survey revealed “the startling number of people in the UK who are suffering from stress but are hiding it from their employers”, Aviva said.
More than a quarter of people cited money as their main cause of stress (27 per cent), followed by relationships (15 per cent), health (13 per cent) and work (13 per cent). However, one in five people (20 per cent) said that they have no causes of stress in their life at all.
The research provided more positive evidence that the stigma around stress and other mental health problems in the workplace was being reduced, Aviva said.
A third of people (33 per cent) said that they would now feel more comfortable talking about it than they would have done five years ago.
Steve Bridger, managing director of group protection at Aviva, said: “In 2016 people should not feel that they have to hide their stress away and suffer in silence.
“Feeling that you can’t be open about a problem is likely to make it worse, not better.
“People don’t raise an eyebrow if a colleague is off work with flu but anything to do with mental health still appears to be taboo.
“The most recent government figures4 say that 15 million working days a year are being lost because of stress and mental illness so this is clearly something employers need to focus on.
“It’s really encouraging to see that some people are feeling more comfortable and confident about being open on mental health in the workplace. That trend needs to continue.
“This can be helped by creating a culture within an organisation which is open and supportive.
“I hope events such as National Stress Awareness Day can encourage more of us to talk about mental health issues instead of keeping it a secret.”
Brighton has an unusually huge amount of public sector employment, due to there being two universities in the City. Getting time off work because of ‘stress’, or claimed stress is much more prevalent in these universities than in the private business sector. That may be because there is more stress involved in being a public sector employee, or it might rather be that the universities are softer-touch employers and that giving out sick-notes easily is deeply in their institutional cultures. Either way, I’m not surprised that Brighton scores very highly for recorded work-related stress.
Useless tossers ! 99% of them aren’t stressed they just got too wasted at the weekend and called in sick with stress being the easiest complaint to fake!