How educated are we on mental health?
Like many of us, I would consider myself to be quite an approachable person when it comes to helping others and offering friendly advice. I was brought up to ‘treat people as you to expect to be treated’ and yet, whilst this is lovely in concept, it’s not always the way things happen and not always the best solution to a problem.
These days, there has been an increasing drive to spread awareness on mental health and quite rightly so. Only recently, The Samaritans revealed that suicide kills three times more people than road traffic accidents in the UK, and that percentage is significantly higher for men than women!
If anything, this shows us that there is still a lot of work to be done in order to really understand the mental health of others and take the correct steps to be more preventative than reactive.
And it’s an ongoing process.
Today, I took my first mental health workshop in a bid to really understand what I can do to help and how we, as companies, can implement effective strategies to support our workforce and create a safe and flourishing environment.
My oh my has it opened my eyes.
Whilst mental health covers an extremely wide spectrum of different experiences and an even wider list of ways in which we can support those in need, if there is one main thing I have taken away from the workshop today, it is that everyone is extremely unique in their experiences.
How I might deal with stress is not necessarily how someone else might deal with it. In fact, I know some people that tend to become quite insular and withdrawn when they become overwhelmed by work or other external pressures, whereas I prefer to talk my heart out. Sometimes maybe a little too much, but that’s beside the point.
Ultimately, today has helped me to understand the importance of identifying subtle changes in a person’s behaviour and recognise that their experiences and coping mechanisms cannot be compared to mine or anyone else’s. Because it’s not the same, and nor should it be. We all act in different ways and cope with different tasks in different ways and that is absolutely and utterly fine.
In no way is this the answer to how we solve mental health issues. And it may seem obvious that ‘each case is unique’. But it’s a start, and the start of a long and continuous journey that I intend to take. To better understand people and the curious and complex ways in which our minds work.
Senior Category Marketing Manager at HomeServe UK
6 年Fantastic article Abby! And such an important topic to be talking openly about. We've written similar articles about mental health in the workplace if you want to do some wider reading - you can find them at https://www.paycare.org/about-paycare/blog/ :)
SE STRATEGIC CONSULTANTS - Working with mid-corporates | Commercially Focused | Collaborative
6 年Great stuff Abi and very open of you to share. The best route to mental wellbeing, in the Stevenson/Farmer report stated recommendations for the role of employers in driving good mental wellbeing in the workplace. These are: developing and communicating a mental health at work plan building awareness of mental health among employees encouraging open conversations about mental health and the support available when employees are struggling providing employees with good working conditions ensuring employees have a healthy work–life balance and opportunities for development promoting effective people management through line managers and supervisors routine monitoring of employee mental health and wellbeing. This “pathway” is an ideal route to better workplace mental wellbeing, but how it is implemented can be open to interpretation. Mattioli Woods, Healthcare Consultant Ed Watling wrote an article recently highlighting this - https://reba.global/content/driving-good-mental-wellbeing-in-the-workplace Many companies do not know where to begin,, but perhaps the first step should be training and awareness, such as the Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) courses. If anyone would like to find out more about this and how we could help, please contact me.
Senior CFD Engineer
6 年Great article. I would say that men are normally the kind of people that tend to become insular when they become overwhelmed by stress (it happens to me and many others I know), while I also think women are sensibly better at dealing with it by discussion. That might explain, at least partially, those men-women suicide percentages. I think the first step is to become used to speaking about mental health openly; nowadays societies are not yet prepared for this topic.