Despite the rising awareness of mental health in the workplace why is it that so many people are still very closed off and shut down when it comes to talking about mental health?.
Having spent the last 9 years working with thousands of people at a one to one level as a solution focused psychotherapist and hypnotherapist and I can share the answer to that question with you.
Fear.
Whether that’s the fear of being treated differently, the fear of being judged or very inherent in all of us, the fear of being rejected, the fact remains that it boils down to the same thing and that’s fear.
That can pose a real challenge for any organisation that is investing in mental health awareness training, because imagine you’re an organisation and you’ve laid out all of these mental health awareness sessions.
You know that at least one in three of your workforce are going to struggle with mental health at some point and yet not everybody has signed up to these mental health awareness sessions.
Now knowing what we know, we know that there’s a lot of people who are working in your organisation that don’t want to attend these mental health awareness sessions because they don’t want to be associated with them because of fear. The fear that “if I’m in that room, then people are going to think that I’ve got got a problem, that there’s something wrong with me”.
You might have people in the organisation that have a need to be seen to be tough and strong and again won’t want to be seen in a room like that. A fear that actually if they’re in that room, they might get asked questions that they feel very uncomfortable about. And you might have people that recognise that they need some kind of level of support, but just haven’t got to that place within themselves yet that they’re ready to reach out.
And of course we’ve got people that unfortunately have put their head in the sand and hope that whatever’s going on is going to go away.
Within all of us there is an inherent need to protect ourselves. That goes all the way back to our hunter gatherer days. There lies within us a deep seated fear of rejection, the fear of being treated differently, the fear of being judged and therefore rejected.
As an organisation, what do you do? What more can you do?
Having worked with so many people, we recognise what your people need is they need to be able to access this information and often to do it in a way that feels private, that feels confidential.
At The Mind Solution we have created a digital wellbeing portal and within the digital wellbeing portal we’ve got a particular zone which is all about mental health. The resources within teach your employees exactly what stress, depression, anxiety, OCD, PTSD is about. We explain to your people what’s happening in the mind and in the body in a way that they can access it and understand without it necessarily being scary.
If you want to give your employees that knowledge, that awareness of mental health, but in a way that makes sure employees feel safe and also gives them all of the other resources that they need to then use it to turn that situation around for themselves then check out the digital wellbeing portal now.
Sara Maude, a seasoned Solution Focused Psychotherapist, Transformational Coach, Hypnotherapist, and EFT Practitioner, brings over a decade of mental health expertise to global organisations. She specialises in workplace wellbeing training, employee health and wellbeing programs and mental health training for managers. Sara’s proficiency also extends to wellbeing consultancy and wellbeing strategy, contributing significantly to the enhancement of employee wellbeing in the workplace.