There is a CV on a hiring manager’s desk. Three months unaccounted for somewhere in the middle. Maybe a stint that ended after six months, no clear reason given. The candidate has a rehearsed explanation: a family situation, a health matter now resolved. The explanation is technically true. What it leaves out is the treatment centre, the group sessions, the slow work of rebuilding a life. What it leaves out is the thing that actually took courage—accepting a problem of addiction, asking for help, and working to get better. This is where the silence in the workplace begins. At the door, before the person in recovery has even been let back in.
There is a team dinner later, once they are hired. Someone orders a round. The question comes, as it always does: What are you having? You say you are not drinking. That works once, maybe twice. By the third time, the story needs a reason. You are on medication. You are on a health kick. Each excuse has a shelf life, and you learn to rotate them. What you cannot say in most Indian workplaces is the truth: you are in recovery, you stopped because you had to, and that the drink in front of you is not a small thing.
This is not hostility, judgement, bias or bullying, and in fact, many colleagues are aware of addiction and its consequent problems. But it is the outcome of avoiding deeper conversations about what recovery, dependence and mental health really means.
Shaping behaviour
Stigma is a belief that does real harm. It assumes that addiction is a moral failing, that people who struggle with substances are unreliable or damaged. But in most Indian workplaces today, the bigger barrier for someone in recovery is not stigma. It is being invisible. A manager who does not know what to say. An HR team without a template. Colleagues who noticed a long absence and have agreed not to mention it.
The distinction matters because stigma is a belief, and beliefs are slow to change. Silence is a behaviour, and behaviour can be shaped. When the leadership speaks about mental health, people follow. A 2024 India report by the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health found that when senior leaders speak openly, 75% of employees are willing to disclose challenges. When they do not, that drops to 56%. Leadership in India has learned to speak about stress and burnout, but it has not yet learned to say the word recovery.
The next step is not more programmes or more leave days—it is creating conditions where people in recovery do not have to choose between honesty and self-preservation when someone orders a round, or every time they sit across a desk trying to explain a gap on a page.
The 2019 AIIMS-Ministry of Social Justice national survey, which covered roughly 200,000 households across every state and Union Territory, found that only one in 38 people with alcohol dependence ever receives treatment. That same survey found that 5.2% of Indians aged 10 to 75 (over 57 million people) show a problematic pattern of alcohol use, with a majority in the 18 to 49 age group.
The few who complete treatment have done something most people in their position never manage—they have admitted a problem, asked for help, and come out on the other side. Then they go back to work. And the workplace, which could be a stabilizing force, offers them no acknowledgment or structure, just the expectation that they will pick up where they left off.
So the person in recovery builds their own structure invisibly. They learn which social situations to avoid and which ones require a story. They learn to manage the small daily questions most people never think about: why they leave early, why they skip the offsite, why they step out of a meeting that has turned into a celebration. They know the clock is always running on the explanation they have offered, and that someone will notice the pattern. The effort that goes into maintaining all of this is considerable. It is also entirely private, because the workplace has given no indication that it could be anything else.
The Naukri Pulse 2025 survey found that nearly three in four Indian professionals hesitate to be transparent about taking time off for mental health. Forty-five per cent label it sick leave.
The policy gap
Most employers are not withholding support out of prejudice. Addiction raises questions that organizations genuinely do not have answers to. What can a manager appropriately ask? What should HR document? What are the implications if someone relapses? Without answers, the default is avoidance. And avoidance, repeated across enough people and situations, becomes the system.
A person who has completed treatment and returned to work is not a liability in waiting. They are, in most cases, a more self-aware professional than the colleague whose problem is unaddressed and invisible. Right now, whether someone in recovery gets support depends entirely on the individual they happen to report to—a decent manager, a compassionate HR head, a colleague who understands. When there are no structured practices, good intent runs on individual discretion.
Organizations that create no framework for recovery do not eliminate risk; they simply push it underground, where it is harder to see and costlier to manage. The attrition that follows, the institutional knowledge that walks out, the replacement hiring… these are real expenses that never get attributed to the right cause.
What is required at the organizational level is simple—a manager who has been told it is appropriate to check in, an HR process that does not route disclosure through the direct reporting line, and a team culture where someone can say they do not drink without it becoming a story.
These are not large structural changes, but they are the difference between a workplace that absorbs someone back in silence and one that acknowledges that something happened and that it took courage to overcome it.
Recovery programmes across traditions share a common starting point: the admission that a problem exists. Indian workplaces, for the most part, have taken that step on mental health. They have not yet taken the next step—addressing addiction and recovery. The willingness may be there, but what’s missing is the willingness to say it out loud.
Arjun R. Iyer is a communications strategist and in recovery.
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