What are Your Workplace Mental Health Needs?

Do You Really Want Advice from a Victim?

Over the last few years I have noted a disturbing trend. And I feel I might even be howled down for mentioning this, but I believe it is an important topic. An elephant has crept into the room.

I’ve been seeing a lot of speakers coming into prominence, endorsed by prominent mental health agencies, visiting worksites to share their “Mental Health” story. I understand that the intention behind having these people come and speak is most honourable. It gives a perspective on what it is like to live with a mental health challenge. Typically, the core situation is Depression or Anxiety or both.

Workplaces would like their employees to have a better understanding of what a person experiencing mental health challenges is going through. That part makes a lot of sense.

But there is a risk and it is significant. At this time, across the general population, mental health issues are misunderstood. I remember someone very close to me, nearly 35 years ago, experiencing extreme depression, anxiety and OCD. She was told that she most probably had a chemical imbalance in her brain. I still hear that explanation used from time to time. I did not realise at the time that there is no such test for this chemical imbalance, and it is, at best, someone’s theory.

If I look back at that person then, I realise she was trapped in some highly inflexible and extremely error riddled thinking. She was creating terrible dramas in her own mind because of the way she was viewing certain issues. She was creating herself as a victim, based on how she was viewing things.

If I had known then what I know now, she would be a vibrant and healthy person now, living her life and sharing her talents.

So, I come back to the speakers who tell their story. “I struggled because my parents didn’t get me.” Or “my brother was famous and successful, and I was forced to live in his shadow”, or, “I was picked on by kids at school”. There are many scenarios. As Carl Jung wrote, “I am not what happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”

How many people have you heard who tell the story of their success and how the spark was ignited as a result of being picked on at school?

When I listened to one speaker, he told his story of working in a high-pressure job with a seemingly uncaring boss, whilst he and his wife were flipping houses. They’d buy one, renovate it and sell it and pick up a tidy profit on the way through. He was also picking up extra casual shifts along the way.

It was clear from his presentation that he and his wife were on a high-speed ticket to wealth, and everything apparently got compromised to meet that end. As his fatigue and stress levels rose, he became more and more reactive till he became a nasty person to be around. His treatment of others broke him down till he slipped into deep depression and became non-functional. He required extended treatment and medication to get back to living a functional life.

At no point in his talk did he express any ownership over what he had done to his life. He expressed zero remorse for what he had done to others. By the end of the talk, the entire room was treating him like a victim, as if the depression had jumped out from behind a door and onto his back. They saw him as a victim of something terrible. Circumstance had undermined his life.

The only learning that came out of the seminar was that people who have mental health issues are victims and there is nothing you can do about it. In this case, they all believed that it was his uncaring boss who had created it all.

But the truth is that this man had compromised his own wellbeing by forgoing sleep, good nutrition and rejuvenating recreation in his quest to create wealth. He turned himself into a reactive “arsehole”, and eventually started to hate himself.

Legendary American Corporate Speaker and Business Coach, Jim Rohn once stated, "The major value of reaching a goal is not to acquire it, but it is the person that you become while you are working to acquire it.” This man had a goal, perhaps motivated by greed or competitiveness with someone else, that turned him into someone he did not like. What a waste.

In his talk, he could have done a great service by saying to his audience, “Do not see me as a victim. See me as someone who had a self-destructive goal. Take note. Are your goals leading you to a good place or a dark place?”

So, let me ask you, as an employer, what does this do for your Workers Compensation Risk if you have a speaker who tells a victim story and blames someone else for his woes? I’d say that it sets off alarm bells. When someone tells you they are depressed, you have no re-course. There is no test to see if it is a genuine claim, and the person does not have to take any responsibility for what they might have been doing in their life to lead them there.

My aim is to help workplaces, and employees within those workplaces, to become more aware and recognise the behaviours and poor decision making that lead people down dark roads, dark roads where mental health challenges may well be waiting.

Companies should be engaging speakers who can shine a light on the things that lead people into dark places. With this awareness, your workers will be able to take better care of each other, supporting each other to stay on the right path, supporting them to be masters of their own life and not victims of circumstance.

Give me a call. Let’s talk about your needs.

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