Why mental health in the workplace schemes fail before they've begun

There are LOADS of courses out there on how to act when someone comes to you with a mental health problem or how to spot the symptoms of mental health difficulties.

There are a miriad of schemes and charters for companies to sign up to and pledge allegiance to, a quick Google search shows thousands of results.

Then there are the days, weeks and months: World Mental Health Day, Time to Talk Day, World Bipolar Day, Stress Awareness Month, Maternal Mental Health Matters Awareness Week, Mental Health Awareness Week, Men's Mental Health Month, to name just a few...

Wonderful, great for awareness, but possibly fruitless for embedding change in an organisation. As I wrote way back in 2017 in the Huffington Post (as it was at the time) mental health awareness is about a culture.

Mental health and wellbeing is nothing without ethos and values

"Well, we're rolling out Mental Health First Aid" is a common response. But, as the HSE point out, there is no evidence that the deployment of mental health first aiders (people trained to spot symptoms of mental health crisis and deescalate) have any wider impact, or in fact that they retain the learning.

The problem and the reason why as stand alone solutions, they will ultimately fail is the lack of one thing:

Who trains managers in mental health and wellbeing friendly values and ethos?

There is a massive expectation on employers to be more emotionally intelligent, more mentally aware, to provide wellbeing activities, but let's be frank here, who actually gets the c-suite or other senior officers in a room, sits them down and says "this is what you need to do with your culture, your ethos and your values"?

No organisational change will be embedded if the leaders at the top do not have the training on how to address these underlying elements...

It may have taken me two years to get to the point where something can be done about this complete lack of available training, but finally we are there!

Spread over the course of a year, we have devised two programmes (one for the very top and another for middle management) to discuss and learn about the important considerations in establishing and embedding mental health and wellbeing friendly culture, values and ethos.

As part of the National Leaders in Mental Health Programme, The Root Of It now offer 2 programmes: one for leaders and one for senior organisation leaders and c-suites. For details, go to https://www.rootofit.com/workplace-mental-health-training