Aren't vacations supposed to be for mental health? I think it's important and healthy to take time off, but why lump it with "sick" days? It's difficult to even pin down what qualifies as a mental health day. Some articles I read it's as general as "not being in the right headspace". I think it's categorically different than when you have an infectious disease.
If that's the goal, taking time off work seems like it would be actively counterproductive.
Think about it, seniority comes with more vacation time. As a "perk", it's desirable on its own. Unless work is inherently unhealthy, and it's a perk to be less unhealthy.
Put differently, mental health is health too.
Fuck this attitude. I've avoided burnout by taking short-notice leave, a day at a time. I have used it to get clothes ready for the next work day, cleanup house, take care of my dog, play video games, or pursue hobbies. It keeps my mental health at a reasonable level. Maybe not 100% but you can't really put a percent on physical health either. And it's easier to take one day to recover(going from e.g. 20% to 80%) than to need months of recovery when you do get totally burned out.
And within some reasonable amount, it's not unreasonable to take it after a really awful night of sleep or crazy 18 hour shift the day before, etc.
With white collar office work we can do remotely, we've all been lulled into taking essentially 0 sick days truly off. I've probably taken an average of 0-1 per year in my career. Most of the time any of us are sick we, at most, offer that we'll be offline a couple hours and login for the rest of the day.
Our parents generation had jobs where they accrued 5-7 days/year of sick day, and actually rolled it over like vacation days.. sometimes with no limits, allowing them to retire a year early paid, etc.
We've let this all get chipped away to the point that many of us don't even have vacation days that rollover, or if they do, must be used within Q1 and then get zeroed out on March 31st.
Never mind a fixed allotment of sick days we can feel comfortable using without suspicion.
Assuming that two weeks a year is the norm going on other posts here, you feel it's appropriate to go say six months (evenly spacing those vacations) to work every day and the employee be at their best? What if said employee rarely gets physically ill, they should not have access to a day off here and there?