Being Well. Our experience of moving the needle away from Zero. (Part 1 of 3)

Note: This 3-part series explores our Mental Wellbeing Initiative, one of four voluntary services offered as part of the broader Sahyog campaign.

TL;DR

X-Leap has started an initiative called Sahyog to support government and social sector organizations during the pandemic, through strategic, operational, and mental health interventions.

As part of this initiative, it recently designed and co-facilitated a wellness program for officers from a government department, including doctors in a North Indian state. The stories were heartbreaking. The numbers corroborate that.

Design principles were used to help individuals overcome the barriers and participate, such as designing an innovative 'Pulse Check' and other interventions. It was heartening to be able to move the needle away from zero. There are miles to go. 

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The second wave of the pandemic which struck India has been a tragedy of epic proportions. Every tragedy is, however, an opportunity to observe the best of humanity, sometimes where we least expect them. In India, across the nation, we saw hundreds of people - common folk, organisations, NGOs, celebrities do whatever they could to scramble relief. Some were organising fund raisers to enable massive oxygen tanks to be airlifted to India while scores of others were organising free food services to families caring for COVID patients.

However, one section of society was largely ignored in mainstream conversations - it was our government officers and staff. They administer the country (which is a complex job in India in the best of times). In times like we experienced, the stress can hardly be imagined. District and block level officials managing the on-ground challenges, public doctors and nurses bearing the bulk of the caseload, information dissemination, social security, logistics and multiple other aspects of statecraft were being managed while handling personal grief.

For those of you who don't know about us, at X-Leap we focus on solving strategic human-centric problems for our clients using a unique blend of management sciences, behavioural science, data science, and human-centered design principles.

At X-Leap, many of us were directly affected. Thankfully, all of us and our immediate families made it through, and we stuck by each other. However, those tragic days of personal suffering combined with a flood of 'bad news' led us to wonder if we could support the government offices or departments by leveraging the skills we had. Thus was born Sahyog - a volunteering collaborative of some niche agencies as well as professionals.

While the peak of the second wave may be behind us (we surely hope so), its effects are not going away soon. While the livelihoods of millions of people have been adversely affected, many have experienced death and suffering very very close to them, combined with the effect of loneliness of the lockdowns. Mental health has become a critical concern. Several studies conducted during this time have also shown a rise in common mental health issues.

Government officers and staff were severely affected as we understood from several anecdotal conversations. Doctors in government facilities experienced a tsunami of patients passing away, while others had to come to terms with their colleagues succumbing to the virus as well. This was having a negative impact on their willingness to work, and their problem-solving abilities.

As we spread the news of our offering to government offices across India, we were not surprised that the most frequent appeals we received were for a mental wellbeing service. Realizing the widespread nature of this very complex issue, the mental wellbeing program - ‘Sahyog: Wellbeing’, was co-designed by the X-Leap team along with Shruti Pakrasi (an experienced organizational psychologist and therapist). The objective was to design a solution that would not just look good on paper, but actually make a positive impact on people, while working within the constraints.

Sahyog: Wellbeing 

Telling people we wanted to help them, was the easy part. It was also important to ensure that our suggestions would be of use. Our team came to understand that our mental state plays a very real, tangible part in all our lives. In many ways, it is at the core of who we are and how we function. All of this considered, we wondered why it was difficult for people to get help. Therein, we identified 3 key challenges to seeking mental health help:

1. Self-diagnosis is extremely difficult. A runny nose, for example, is a clear, physical sign of an underlying flu. Unlike physical health symptoms, the pointers to mental health issues are far more elusive and difficult to actively sense.
2. The existence of significant social stigma makes speaking up about one’s suffering a huge burden, for fear of anticipated social and familial repercussions. Being able to share is crucial to getting effective help.
3. A general lack of awareness about the negative effects of mental health issues – for instance, the general trend that poor mental health is widely associated with lower effectiveness at work.

We knew that there were certain behavioral barriers that stopped people from asking for help on mental health issues. Knowing this, we tried to design around these hindrances:

• Context: co-created closely with the persons of contact (POCs) within government departments who understood the psyche and culture of their teams
• Data and expertise driven: Given the newness of the request, we decided to absorb as much data as we could, to enable our experts to customise the offerings to best suit the specific needs of the cohorts
• Approachability: Used empathetic language to create a sense of ease and understanding
• Low cognitive load: Designed a sign-up process that was easy-to-complete and cognitively light, mindful of the already overburdened mental state of those reaching out
• Confidentiality: Assuring the security of the participants’ involvement and their information, being mindful of their privacy concerns.
• Privacy Choice: We offered a choice of anonymity, respectful of a participant’s wishes to not divulge personal details.

The Wellbeing Journey

A three-stage journey was designed for the participants - gradually increasing the intensity of the engagement.

As a first step in our wellbeing journey, we carefully designed a self-reported 'Pulse Check' tool, to assess the state of our participants' mental health.

The second step in our wellbeing journey consisted of an interactive group awareness session, carried out by Hamsaz Wadhwani, CEO of The 7th Fold and an experienced group counselor. This was a video call.

The session was used to address the signs and symptoms that were identified using the Pulse Check such as explaining what ‘anxiety’ really means and how to identify it for oneself. Some preliminary strategies and tips to deal with these symptoms were also shared, including some breathing exercises, which would help the participants to improve self-care.

Finally, having gone through the introspective and instructional awareness session, participants were given the option to take part in either a group-meditation session with our partner, Anupam Jain, a licensed “Heartfulness” trainer, or a more personalized and private one-to-one counseling session with our panel of expert psychologists, such as Shruti.

The impact so far

Adapting to large-scale disasters like climate change or in this case, pandemics, requires us to move from simply responding to the unfolding events to developing resilient practices around these events. It is fairly obvious that COVID is not going away anywhere soon. Thus, there would be waves and while many would suffer physically, many more would suffer mentally. As we know, there is inertia regarding discussing or taking action to improve mental health. Our aim in developing Sahyog: Wellbeing was to start down the road towards these resilient practices and help move the needle from zero. 

Our initial efforts were directed to explore ideas that could help people who were suffering. We are happy that our efforts have yielded some positive results and helped us learn a lot. Given that this was not a ‘mandated program’, we take heart from the fact that we have been played a small role in moving the needle for at least 30 individuals. The POCs from the respective departments were true heroes – who identified the need for mental health support and supported us actively to administer this initiative as a completely ‘opt in’ program. 

We hope that they and their loved ones' lives are at least a little better for this and we would like to think that many more citizens would also be impacted positively, given the significant impact they have on our lives.

May this inspire other organisations – government, private, non-profits to take this seriously and reach out. The time for positive action is NOW.

The road ahead

Reaching out and asking for help is always hard. It's even harder if the context is mental health. But our frontline workers who participated in 'Sahyog: Wellbeing', took the first brave step in wanting to address these problems.

We used best practices from fields of behavioral psychology and wellness to design ways to promote our frontline friends to reach out to us. We also valued that their time be well spent in identifying and coping with their personal issues. The three stages of the Wellbeing journey helped them do this.

In an upcoming blog, we want to explain more around our choice of methodology and how (we hope) it helped respondents recognize that they were mentally overburdened. In turn, we hope that we have taken a positive step towards destigmatizing a serious personal issue. The core of this campaign carries forward our aim to help build a kinder world.

Stay tuned for part 2!

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If you liked what you read, please follow our LinkedIn page for more upcoming content.

You can take the 'Pulse Check' survey here.

If you, or someone you know, would benefit from our wellbeing initiative, please get in touch with us here.

Also, do share this within your own network!

Design partner: Shruti Pakrasi

Session partner: The 7th Fold

Creative partner: YUWEUS

About the authors: Prithwiraj Ghosh, an Associate Consultant at X-Leap, is a behavioral economics and science master's degree holder from the University of Warwick. Debabrat Sukla, Strategic Communications Lead at X-Leap, is an experienced communication specialist working at the crossroads of science and communication.