Supporting mental wellbeing through menopause, fertility and parenthood

The gap between how organisations structure support and how employees experience life is costing businesses more than they realise.

Mental wellbeing rarely announces itself as a single, isolated event. It shows up in disrupted sleep before a fertility appointment, in a racing heart before explaining hot flushes in a meeting room, in the guilt of leaving your baby at nursery for the first time. Yet employers still tend to treat menopause, fertility and parenthood as three separate lines on a benefits spreadsheet, when for many employees they are simply chapters of the same story: their mental health.

Employee mental health has never been higher on the boardroom agenda, and the numbers explain why. Deloitte's most recent case for investment puts the cost of poor mental health to UK employers at roughly £51 billion a year, while CIPD absence data shows employees are now off sick for close to two working weeks annually on average.

What that headline figure hides are where much of the strain originates from: reproductive and hormonal health events that businesses have historically filed under "personal", rather than "workplace".

Menopause: a mental health issue in a hormonal disguise

Menopause is too often reduced to hot flushes and forgetfulness.

In reality, CIPD's national survey of working women aged 40 to 60 found that two-thirds say their symptoms have had a mostly negative effect on them at work, and over half could point to a specific time symptoms stopped them coming in at all. The Fawcett Society has separately found that one in ten women have left a job entirely because of menopause.

The psychological symptoms, anxiety, low mood, brain fog, loss of confidence, are often the hardest to manage precisely because they're invisible and rarely raised with a line manager.

From April 2026, larger UK employers will be able to publish voluntary menopause action plans under the Employment Rights Act, with reporting becoming mandatory from 2027. That's a welcome shift, but a policy on paper does little for the employee sitting in a meeting today, quietly convinced she's losing her edge.

Fertility: the mental health story nobody puts on the agenda

Fertility struggles carry a similarly heavy psychological toll, and it’s one that employers are even less likely to see. Clinical research has repeatedly found rates of depression among people undergoing fertility treatment comparable to those seen in patients managing serious chronic illness, with some studies placing clinically significant anxiety in well over half of patients during treatment.

Yet only a small minority ever access dedicated mental health support alongside their clinical care.

These figures are usually measured in the person undergoing treatment, but partners are far from unaffected. Research on couples going through IVF consistently finds elevated anxiety and depression in both partners, not just the one having the procedures, yet it's almost always the person going through treatment who's offered time off, flexibility, or a conversation with HR. The partner is expected to simply carry on.

For employees, this plays out as unexplained absences around clinic appointments, concentration that disappears mid-afternoon, and a reluctance to disclose what's happening for fear of how it will be perceived. Left unsupported, that strain doesn't stay contained to fertility treatment. It bleeds into performance reviews, team relationships, and ultimately whether that employee is still with the business in twelve months.

Parenthood: when the transition becomes the trigger

New parenthood is meant to be joyful, and it often is, but it's also one of the most psychologically disruptive transitions a person will go through.

The Royal College of Psychiatrists estimates that as many as 85,000 new mothers in England experienced postnatal depression last year alone, and clinicians increasingly recognise that fathers and non-birthing parents are affected too, just less visibly.

Add sleep deprivation, a shifting sense of identity, and the practicalities of returning to work and it’s clear why so many parents describe the return to the office as harder than the leave itself.

Why treating these in isolation doesn't work

Here's the truth for HR and reward teams: an employee doesn't experience "a fertility benefit", "a mental health benefit" and "a parental leave policy" as three separate things. She experiences one continuous, often gruelling, stretch of her working life. Splitting support into disconnected point solutions means she must explain her situation from scratch every time she asks for help, and many people simply stop asking.

The organisations getting this right are building one joined-up pathway, where clinical fertility and hormonal health support sits alongside mental health provision rather than apart from it, so an employee going through IVF, perimenopause or a difficult return from leave can reach a therapist, a specialist nurse or a manager conversation guide in the same place, without repeating their story three times over.

Building the business case

Retention, presenteeism, and the cost of losing experienced people at exactly the moment their expertise matters most to the business are all measurable, and all improve when mental wellbeing is designed into reproductive and parental life-stage support from the outset, rather than bolted on afterwards.