It’s currently popular to post about mental health issues on social media, like TikTok and Instagram. People dramatize their issues for views and likes and attention. So, you have a lot of people “self-diagnosing” mental health issues that aren’t actually clinical disorders.
This leads to people not perceiving mental health as a serious issue. Instead, people are abusing the “mental health” status to get what they want: leniency, time off, an easier workload, what have you.
This distracts from people who actually have clinically-diagnosed mental health issues. It weakens their arguments when an actually diagnosed person needs assistance, like a day off.
So the immediate fix for this is to have a physicians note or similar for every mental health day that you need. The hope is that doctors (an impartial third party authority) would sufficiently diagnose someone’s mental health. They can separate between the actually afflicted and the “I just want an excuse / easy life” crowd.
Although if you chat with MD’s about this topic, diagnosing mental health is hard so that isn’t a silver bullet either.
The other thing that society can do: stop romanticizing mental health. Stop posting about it on social media for likes and attention. Get validation and attention from some other aspect of your life, like playing an instrument or doing something well.