Unrelieved stress can definitely cause absenteeism or lateness.  It’s harder to get up and get going in the morning if you haven’t slept well the night before.  Or if you’ve had too much to drink or taken drugs to reduce your stress. 

Also work starts to lose its meaning the more stressed you get.  It is easy to develop a “Who Cares” attitude.

This short quotation was taken from an article called “Mental Health Facts” in the Vancouver Sun newspaper in 2007 ( I forgot to write down the date of the article).

The source is Mental Health Works: an initiative of the Canadian Mental Health Association, Ontario.

“Employees of three major American companies who displayed chronic symptoms of depression were twice as likely to miss work due to health reasons and seven times as likely to report missed workdays at the time of the follow-up survey.”