Mental Wellbeing of Male Leather Tannery Workers: A study of Kanpur City, India

Improved mental health can be articulated as good physical health. Leather tannery workers are exposed hazardous work environment, living environment, substance use, life style and many more important reasons. Many studies... [ view full abstract ]

Improved mental health can be articulated as good physical health. Leather tannery workers are exposed hazardous work environment, living environment, substance use, life style and many more important reasons. Many studies confirmed that the significant proportion of mental health people increasing in India. The work environment as well as the living environment are important health risk factors among leather tannery workers. Leather tannery workers are more susceptible to many chemicals and physical hazards, just because they are liable to be affected by their exposure to lots of hazardous materials and processes during tanning work. The aim of this study to determine the level of mental health disorder of male leather tannery workers in Kanpur city, India. This study utilized the primary data from the cross- sectional household study which was conducted from January to June, 2015 on 286 tannery and 295 non-tannery workers as a part of PhD program from the Jajmau area of Kanpur city, India. This study utilized the general health questionnaire (GHQ-12), and work related stress scale to test the mental wellbeing of workers. This study utilized the Cronbach alpha to test the internal consistency of GHQ-12 questionnaire for male tannery workers. We found the alpha value 0.93 for the entire sample. The range of item scale correlation was 0.84-0.64, the item one “able to concentrate “had the highest (0.84) and the item eight “able to face problem” was the lowest (0.64) correlation coefficient. Around one-third of tannery workers had severe mental health problems. An important result from the study was that tannery workers involved in beam house work in tannery (58%) had severe mental health problem. Work related stress scale found the statistically significant results for tannery workers. This study found the statistically significant association with tannery work and mental health problem among tannery workers.