Wouldn’t it be absolutely epic if a globally shared and accepted understanding of mental health was one of the things to come out of the global pandemic?
Well, I am guessing that if you’re reading this text then you, like me, would answer Yes.
I have worked in People teams for the past 10+ years and from experience I can tell you that a lot of mental health related leave gets masked under “cold” or “flu” or “stomach bug” because of two reasons:
a) people not being comfortable saying they have been struggling with their mental health and being afraid of the company perceiving them as weak due to the stigma around mental health and suffering consequences at work
b) companies not understanding the full impact that mental health has and not being willing to recognise it as a legitimate health reason.
But if mental health is one of the main reasons behind legitimate sickness but companies fail to recognise it, what happens then? People still call in sick, but they lie about the reason.
Which means it’s about time we stop ignoring the signs and address the elephant in the room.
Being sad is not the same as mental health. People can’t just “snap out of it” and be happy. Companies wouldn’t turn to someone with a broken foot and say “Just jump, you’ll feel better”. Mental health is real and needs to be acknowledged by everyone.
The bottom line is: we all have mental health.
Many of us have struggled with it over periods of time in our lives, we’ve been up and we’ve been down. And the worse part is, sometimes we’ve been made to feel weak or worthless for being down. Which only pushes us even further down.
What we all need is understanding and kindness. And I don’t mean when we’re feeling down. No — we need it all the time!
Wouldn’t it be awesome if kindness and empathy in the world were two of the outcomes of this pandemic?
It’s so hard for us to admit when we’re not okay and it’s especially hard for us to be kind to ourselves when everything around us looks dark and bleak. So, having that wave of kindness invade us from a friendly face is exactly what we need.
Wouldn’t it be awesome if we were able to just tell our boss we have to leave work early to go to see our therapist, like we do when we go to the dentist?
Millennials represent a big chunk of our workforce everywhere these days, and millennials also are considered one of the most anxious generations ever, so it is baffling that companies still enforce the stigma around mental health instead of creating the right infrastructure to fully support their teams.
Companies that don’t make space for mental health and that fail to recognise the impact and importance of mental health in the workplace will perish. Meanwhile the ones that do recognise it, will be celebrated and will be the employers that everyone will want to work for, and thus thrive.
So my final question for you is the following:
wouldn’t the death of a stigma around mental health be something worth celebrating at the end of the pandemic?
And the answer is YES!
