The Hidden Pandemic Affecting Your Balance Sheet

August 12, 2025

By Tim Elwin

There is a cost inside your company that will never show up in a report. It will not appear in budget forecasts. It will not be raised in a strategy meeting. You will not see it on an HR dashboard. But it is there. And it is growing.

This is not a minor or invisible problem. It is a hidden pandemic draining Australian businesses an estimated $90 million every single day in lost productivity, absenteeism and turnover. It is a crisis you cannot see on the floor, yet it is already shaping the way your people show up to work.

The signs are easy to miss. The team member whose performance quietly fades. The one who has become quieter in meetings. The one working from home more and more, stepping into empty rooms for phone calls, no longer fully present. The one quit with a not so valid reason.

You are not seeing laziness or disengagement. You are seeing survival.

It starts at home

We are watching the worst teenage mental health crisis tear through families at a scale Australia has never seen. Eating disorders, self-harm, OCD, substance use, depression, suicide attempts and for too many, sadly succeeding.

These crises are not happening inside your office walls. They are happening in the homes of the people who keep your business running. Your staff are holding their families together while trying to hold their careers together and your business together. They arrive, they try, but they are split down the middle, half in the room and half in a crisis.

The pattern is predictable

It starts with a few signs that something is wrong. A shift in a teenager’s behaviour. Then it escalates. The family scrambles to understand and to get help. Appointments, diagnoses, new routines. Bills piling up. Sleepless nights. Fear setting in.

At some point, one parent often leaves the workforce to manage the crisis. The other parent, possibly your employee, stays because they have to keep the income coming. Medical costs eat through the household budget. Energy is spent on survival, not performance.

That quiet resignation letter you saw last month may have been the result of this. And if one parent has left the workforce, there is a good chance the other is still employed somewhere, possibly in your business, trying to hold the line.

You do not see what they are carrying

They are taking calls from the school about lack of engagement or risky behaviour. Managing weekly GP visits, fortnightly psychologist sessions, monthly psychiatrist appointments. Sitting through hospital admissions and emergency interventions.

They do all of this in silence because they fear the label, the judgement and the perception of being unreliable. So they show up to meetings. They answer emails. They pretend. But they are not fine. You cannot expect someone to perform at full capacity when they spent last night in an emergency ward or sleeping beside their child’s hospital bed.

This is sadly not rare

According to the ABS, approximately half of the Australian workforce are parents and around half of those have a teenager at home. Now put that beside the fact that around half of Australian teenagers are living with significant mental distress. That means roughly one in four people working in your business are dealing with the emotional and practical weight of raising a teenager, let alone one who is struggling with mental health issues.

Poor mental health already costs Australian businesses $936 million every single day 1. When you focus on just the parents dealing with teenage mental health emergencies, the numbers are staggering. This single hidden issue is draining an estimated $90 million every day from Australian businesses. That's up to $33 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism and turnover.

This is not a fringe problem. It is already inside your business, quietly reshaping how your people show up, perform and stay.

The cost of doing nothing

Ignore it and you will pay in turnover, burnout, absenteeism, presenteeism and the quiet erosion of team culture. You will lose knowledge, leadership potential and stability. You will lose the very people you rely on most when they are forced to choose between their child and their job.

I know what many executives think. It is not our problem. We are not a charity. But looking after your staff is not charity, it is smart business. Supporting parents in crisis reduces turnover, protects productivity and strengthens loyalty. Think prevention and support instead of crisis management.

Looking after your people means more than a slogan on a careers page. It means giving them flexibility that is real, not just a line in a policy. It means leave arrangements that reflect the reality of caring for a child in crisis. It means training leaders to recognise the signs and respond with understanding instead of penalties. It means creating a workplace where staff can speak up without fear of stigma or career damage.

Sometimes big business needs to think like a family business. When you look after your people, you protect your bottom line and your future workforce. Driving profits at the expense of the people who hold your business together will eventually cost you far more. And it’s simply bad business.

What matters now

I am telling you what I have seen firsthand. What I have lived firsthand. Families in their hardest moments. Teenagers who want to disappear. Parents weighing up which one will quit work to become the full-time carer. Parents terrified for anyone to know, even when their child is in hospital.

This is your workforce. These are the people holding your business together. They are not statistics. Even if you try to replace them, there is a good chance the person you hire will be carrying the same burden. They are sitting at your desks and logging into your meetings right now, hoping no one notices what they are carrying.

This is already inside your business. The only question is whether you will lead through it and support them, or turn away and leave them to carry it alone.

About the Author

I’m an accredited, award-winning documentary producer, director and photographer, and the founder of Urban Ripples, a Sydney-based production company dedicated to telling stories of resilience, well-being and social impact within the disability and mental health sectors.

My work includes The Definition of Happiness, now streaming globally on Prime Video, and Chasing Silence, an upcoming documentary confronting the youth mental health crisis. I create visual storytelling to challenge how we think, feel and act, with the goal of sparking conversations that lead to real change.

Source: ¹ HRM Online, Poor mental health is costing employers over $900 million per day, hrmonline.com.au