What a manager is and is not responsible for

Most managers land in this with two contradictory fears: that they will fail somebody, and that they will do something that gets them or the organisation into trouble. Both are worth addressing plainly, because the space between them is where the useful work is.

What you are not

You are not a clinician. You cannot assess risk, and you should not try. The tools that claim to let a non-specialist rate someone's suicide risk do not work even in clinical hands, which is why this site never produces a risk score for a person.

You are not a crisis service. You are not on call at 3am, and if you behave as though you are, you will be unavailable by winter.

You are not responsible for the outcome. This one matters most. You are responsible for what you do — not for whether somebody lives. Managers who absorb the second version make worse decisions, because every choice becomes freighted with a weight no decision can carry.

What you are

Responsible for the conditions. This is the part organisations most often skip past. If the workload is unmanageable, the hours are punitive, the bullying report went nowhere, or the pay does not cover rent — that is inside your remit in a way that nothing about anyone's diagnosis is.

Responsible for acting on what you know. Once you have been told, you have a duty of care: to make reasonable adjustments, to not make things worse, and to route the person to help that exists.

Responsible for keeping your word. Every promise you make in that conversation — who you will tell, when you will follow up, what happens to their work — is now load-bearing. A manager who forgets a promised Friday check-in has taught the person something about disclosure.

Responsible for the record. Factual, proportionate, and shared only with people who need it.

The legal shape of it, roughly

In the UK an employer has a duty of care and, where a condition has a substantial long-term effect on daily activities, a duty to make reasonable adjustments under the Equality Act. Depression and anxiety frequently meet that threshold, and a great many managers do not realise it applies.

Practically, what protects both of you is the same thing: adjustments agreed in writing, reviewed on a date, with occupational health involved where it is available. Not because paperwork is protective in itself, but because it turns vague good intentions into things that actually happen.

What to do when you genuinely do not know

Say so. I don't know what the right thing to do here is, and I'm going to find out rather than guess is a good answer, and it is far better than confident improvisation.

Then ask occupational health, HR, or — where there is nobody — a crisis line, which will talk to a manager about how to support someone. That is a normal use of them.

When you have to act against their wishes

Rarely, and only over immediate danger.

If somebody has told you they intend to act today, confidentiality gives way. You may be told afterwards that you betrayed them, and you may have to sit with that. It is still the right call, and it is one of the few places where the decision is genuinely not yours to soften.

Everything short of that — a difficult disclosure, a bad patch, a history — does not license telling people. The bar is immediate danger, not discomfort.

The thing nobody tells managers

You will probably do this imperfectly. You will say a clumsy thing, or miss something, or be on leave at the wrong moment.

Almost none of that is decisive. What people describe as having mattered is seldom a well-chosen sentence — it is that somebody noticed, took it seriously, and was still there a few months later.

When someone refuses help → · Supporting someone who is suicidal →