Normalizing Mental Health Conversations at Work

In today's episode of The Hearth, we talk about mental health at the workplace.

Together, we'll explore the cost of mental health issues in the workplace, the stigma associated with it, and the transformative steps we can take to foster a healthier, more sustainable work ecosystem.

The first step towards change is understanding the magnitude of the problem.

Did you know that 20% of Americans have a reported mental health condition, with depression and anxiety costing us an estimated $210 billion every year?

And the cost of alcohol and substance abuse? A staggering $400 billion.

Not to mention the increase in suicide rates, the second leading cause of death for those between 15 and 24 years old. Yet, the stigma attached to mental health issues often prevents employees from seeking care.

In this episode, we'll debunk the myths surrounding these issues, encourage open dialogue, and scrutinize practical ways to build a more equitable and sustainable work environment.

I hope you enjoy today's episode.

Candice's Story
Wellbeing in the Workplace

If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart, and you’d like to connect with me, here are a few ways you can do that.

One is my newsletter, it’s where I put most of my time and energy when I’m not working with clients or on this podcast. Sorry social media! It’s a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and of course updates on what’s happening with the podcast. Whenever something is going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.

Another resource that I have for you is my Guide to Doing Work Differently. The guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place to start.

Last, if you’ve got a burning question, a comment, or a situation you’d like my eyes on, you can email me at candice@fortressandflourish.com.


If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out, and if you’re feeling generous, leave a review. Reviews help other like-minded folks find their way to this resource.

Learn more about Candice and her work here.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:04

The hearth is for you if you're a business leader with a team. Here we have conversations about how to keep growing. When you feel you've reached your capacity, when what you're doing is working but you're starting to see the cracks, when there's a gap between where you're at now and where you want to be, here we find ways to transition through the struggle of survival toward creating a thriving business that supports you and your team as whole humans. Your host is me, candace Elliott. I'm a business strategist and mentor who specializes in working with business owners who are going through periods of growth. Especially when you're adding more people to your team, the practices and systems that worked when your team was smaller just don't seem to fit anymore, and when you're caught in stress and reaction, it's tough to reimagine the way that you created your world of work, both your own personal one and the one that you created for others. I help people align their values and business practices to build practical, sustainable, thriving work ecosystems and no, this isn't just some work utopia talk. To do this, I bring forward my decade-long professional background in human resources and organizational development, working with growing businesses across many sectors, and my decades-long search for meaning and wholeness, which includes researching the history of work and how it came to be what it is today, practicing a trauma-informed approach to business and integrating work, life and spirituality into a meaningful whole. Let's take this journey together, hello, hello, welcome to this episode of the Hearth where we're going to talk about normalizing mental health conversations at work. So I'm going to start out by telling you my own story of mental health and work, and then I'm going to share with you some research that I found very fascinating and just some practical kind of ways to do this. So first a story. I definitely grew up with the work harder, faster, more like mentality.

Speaker 1: 3:13

I have a grandfather, ray Elliott, who was in the military during World War II and then he received the GI Bill, was able to build a house and start a construction company and worked very hard. He built nut packing houses, he built apartment buildings, he purchased apartment buildings, he had an almond orchard, he owned an oil field. He my family to this day owns a cabin in the Sierra Nevada mountains which was purchased by my grandparents. And so there is this narrative that was passed from that generation to my parents' generation. My mother's father was a prisoner of war during World War II. He was interned in Japan, was extremely emaciated when he came out of the internment camp and was saved by the Red Cross the US Red Cross, which is how he came from. They were Dutch colonizers living in Indonesia. He was saved by the Red Cross and brought to Australia where he learned English and got an engineering degree. He built the house that his family my family lived in there and then came to Chicago and worked for Harza Engineering and built hydroelectric dams all over the world.

Speaker 1: 4:55

So from both sides of my family to my parents is this narrative of like work hard, you can always do more If you think you have it bad. Just think about what we had to go through in this expectation of success and working hard. Right, my parents were the last of the baby boomers becoming adults in the 80s, right? And so there's this corporate mentality working very long hours. My mom actually found a really unique way of. She became a graphic designer and was able to find part-time work so that she could still take care of me and my sister and do a lot of the child's care responsibilities, at least during the week. While my dad had really long hours, I remember when I was a kid him traveling like three hours or more a day to and from work for different projects that he was working on, and he is still, to this day, a construction project manager, and so I grew up with this as the model of what work is right. It's like you find a profession and you get hired by a company and you do this job and you pretty much do similar jobs, working your way up in a career ladder for your entire life, and that's like that didn't quite happen for me.

Speaker 1: 6:44

I graduated from college in 2008, right in the middle of the recession, and you probably, if you've listened to the last season of the Hearth, you've probably heard some of this story. There's an episode that's called Candice's Story. It goes into much more detail than I'm talking about right now because I'm really bringing this relating all of this to mental health and the workplace, but so I like tried a lot of different things throughout my 20s. I was trying to figure out like I went to school for archaeology or for anthropology and philosophy. I knew that I didn't want to do that. I didn't want to go to do a master's degree right away, so I got a teaching certificate and I taught English as a second language because I had a friend who was doing it and it just seemed like sort of a shoe in job, you know, which was good, because the recession happened and so I needed like work. I needed reliable work where I wasn't going to get fired from my job and then be unable to support myself.

Speaker 1: 7:58

Through a series of events, I came to human resources and I had had a lot of instability. That happened in my life during my 20s. There were some very difficult personal choices that I had to make which were traumatic. I now can go back and see them. You know, like I can see the me that is 25, that's trying to like control everything to be able to survive in the world and not live in poverty and to like scrape and struggle and get like to a better position in the world, and I can see how that is a protective mechanism that I built because of the uncertainty that I was struggling throughout that time and also how that has had unintentional negative effects since, like such as keeping me in that sort of survival mindset past the time when I had really gotten out of the survival mode. How does that really, as a working professional, when I got to, I think I was around 30.

Speaker 1: 9:19

I had this experience of burnout and it was very intense. There was, like this specific, gradually increased, you know, over time till there was this like moment of crisis, and what happened in that moment is that I was like hyperventilating, I was like breathing really fast. I couldn't control my breathing, I was like crying. I couldn't, like you know, keep myself from feeling a whole range of mostly very difficult emotions of like panic and stress and anger and sorrow and all of these things wrapped up together. And I knew that like something was happening with me, with my mental health, psychologically, like something was happening and I didn't feel like I had the tools to be able to deal with it. Like I have meditated for a long time, I've done yoga for a long time, I have, like you know, I know a lot. I know I knew at that time a bit about mental health, but I knew enough that what was happening then was beyond what I could fix on my own. Like it wasn't like a mindset thing, right, it wasn't like I needed to change my mindset about it. It was like I needed to do some deep, real work into how I became an adult in order to like figure out how to move forward.

Speaker 1: 11:03

But at the time I was sent to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist told me, like, this is normal, it happens all the time, you know, people don't? It's not a panic attack, because I went in and I was like I had I think I had a panic, panic attack and this psychiatrist is, like you didn't have a panic attack, like, what, like, what else can you say about it? Let's break it down into like the pieces that it was. It's that you were crying, that you were breathing a lot, that you, you know, were shaking in the car, that you like, like couldn't get yourself together for hours, but that's not a panic attack. I'm laughing now looking back, because it's just interesting how other people, especially mental health professionals, can label or unlabel experiences in ways that are and are not helpful. But I knew that this was not a helpful person for me to be talking to, because I couldn't I mean, I just couldn't keep doing what I was doing.

Speaker 1: 12:17

At the same time, I had a very strong pain that happened in the right side of my neck. It was like a muscle spasm and it did not go away for weeks, and so there was this mental as well as this like physical manifestation of stress. Really, that's what it was. That was the catalyst for starting my company, for, you know, working with business owners on creating workplaces where people can thrive, where people are really supported in the fullness of their humanity at work, and for me, this combination of you know, the physical and mental health and burnout and the structures that we just assume have to be the way that work is. It's just. It can be a different way.

Speaker 1: 13:16

And so for the past few months, I've, you know, been on this deep dive of looking into research around health and the workplace and employees, and all of that. An interesting study that I found was done by the US Chamber of Commerce and Veterans Affairs, specifically hiring our heroes, and they looked into mental health and work and they actually created a toolkit that'll link, that has to do with supporting mental health in the workplace, and they found that 80% of Americans are expected to face a mental health challenge in their lifetime. And I mean I feel like 80, I don't know. I feel like 100% of people are going to face a mental health challenge of some kind in their lifetime. I can get why they're only at 80, but really I mean everyone goes through times when they have more or less capacity. Everyone is going to lose someone who's close to them. You know, everyone is going to go through some kind of really difficult decision-making process, and the point, though, is that, you know, with this high number, is that these challenges have to be normalized, like we can't stigmatize people because they're having mental health challenges. We have to recognize that mental health is a part of our health in the way that our physical health is. It's not like we I mean, for the most part, I don't think people shame people if they break a leg right, but there is shame that people experience if they're having difficult mental health challenges, or and then also if people are neurodivergent, which is not something I'm really talking about today, but I think is a part of the conversation too.

Speaker 1: 15:24

Within this kind of world of mental health, there are some costs that came out of this study that are huge. Like because mental health issues are so common and because they happen so often, they're very expensive. Depression and anxiety alone are estimated to cost the American economy $210 billion on an annual basis. That's through direct and indirect costs. So direct costs are like medical expenses. Indirect costs are like what happens with businesses, so absenteeism, lost productivity, lost earning potential and these kinds of things. Another sort of related cost is alcohol and substance abuse, which is estimated to cost another $400 billion, and this is annually, every single year.

Speaker 1: 16:30

Some other kind of like statistics in this area just to emphasize how important it really is is that 20% of Americans, at the time of this study, had a reported mental health condition, and that's reported. There's like a whole slew of people who are not reporting their mental health condition, so just one out of five people has a reported mental health condition. And then another important statistic because it is related to mental health and then also to loneliness is that there has been a 30% increase in suicide in the US in the last 25 years. It's the 10th leading cause of death in our country and it's actually the second leading cause of death for youth between 15 and 24 years old, and in my life, the time when I was most at risk for suicide was during those ages between 15 and 24.

Speaker 1: 17:45

Along with this sort of understanding of how prevalent the issue is, most employees will not seek care for mental health issues or talk about them in the workplace because of the stigma that there is against them. It's actually eight out of 10 employees will not seek care, and so what does that stigma look like? So one is just generally how people talk about mental health. So if the narrative is like we work really long hours, we just get it and we make it happen, we like it doesn't matter what's going on in your life, like you just gotta like pull yourself up by the bootstraps and get her done, there's not a lot of sympathy for mental health challenges that are coming up or physical health challenges that are coming up, because what happens in that work environment?

Speaker 1: 18:52

When there is an issue let's just say someone needs to have a surgery, right, and because the way that you have created the business is to always be at capacity, like there is no more capacity to do any more work, then there is no way to deal with the needs of this employee who maybe they have to have heart surgery, right, and so because there's no capacity, there is pressure on the organization and the employee to deal with this situation and it becomes more of a problem and it becomes more stressful for everyone and it's already a stressful thing, right. Whereas if you have another kind of a work environment where you're checking in with everybody every week to see how everybody's doing capacity-wise, to find out on a red, yellow, green spectrum how everybody's doing. You can track how much or how little people have available to deal with things and how much people are going through and how much what's happening outside of work is affecting work or how much work is affecting what's outside of work. And so this is like one important thing to do is to normalize talking about mental health and capacity is one way to do that. Capacity meaning what do I have the ability to take on right now? Like, do I have the capacity for the job that I have in front of me? Maybe I don't. Maybe I have only capacity for a sliver of the job that is in front of me right now because of what's happening in my life. And if I can focus really well on this sliver and deal with all the things that are happening in my life, I will be able at some point to take on more. But it's understanding that people's capacity it expands and it contracts and it expands and it contracts. And if you're able to expand and contract with the person and keep them engaged in the work through their difficulties and support them, then you'll be able to keep them for the long term, you know, and they'll know that they're supported by you, respected, trusted, that you're able to work with them through things that happen in their lives. And yeah, I mean in the short run, when the person is having their difficulties, like you're not going to get as much productivity, but over the long run of the lifetime of the person working with you, you will get more. So I said there are two forms of this. So one is how the organization normalizes mental health conversations. The other is the employees' comfortability to participate in those conversations and knowing that they will be treated well and still, you know, perceived as a part of the team and perceived well through those conversations, is essential. So the more that this is the case, the more likely it is that someone is going to seek care or treatment.

Speaker 1: 22:30

If someone is, like, fearful of losing their job or a promotion opportunity or, you know, if there's kind of like this cutthroat, like work dynamic going on of like performer or die, then people are not going to talk about what's happening with them in their mental health. And then what happens is, let's say, I'm going through something very difficult and I can't talk about it at work because I think I'm going to lose my job. If I talk about it or nobody cares, there isn't a way to have this conversation with the people that I work with, then I'm going to start to feel resentful about my time at work. This is one way I could go. I could start to feel resentful about just going to work. Then maybe I'm going to start looking at my pay and be like, oh, is this even worth my time? Like, why should I be here if I'm only getting this much per hour of my work? Like what if I just go somewhere else where there's an easier job and do that instead? So then this conversation starts happening and then the person really starts to check out. So instead of adjusting the work to fit the needs of the employee so that you can decrease the capacity that's needed for the person to do the job while they're going through a difficult time, they're going to do it for themselves and you're not going to get the kind of productivity that you would think that you would need. And instead of retaining them and keeping them through the difficult time, you're just going to lose them Because it's going to create argument and conflict and tension.

Speaker 1: 24:20

What are some steps that you can take? I mean, we've already talked about having some kind of check-in like a way where either your whole team or you could do it department by department. Just kind of talks about. You know, it may not be mental health. You don't have to say like let's talk about your mental health everyone together, because that kind of gets into a weird territory. But you can talk about capacity, like what is your capacity this week? Are you feeling good? Like, are you feeling solid on you know, your plan? Do you feel like you could take on a little bit extra? Are you feeling like you're good on your plan but there's no way you could bring on anymore? Are you feeling like, oh my gosh, this is too much, I can't possibly. What do we do? And those are good kind of markers to know with your team on a week by week basis, like how it's going. It can also bring up questions that they have about their work where they need help, kind of getting to the next step. So that's something to think about.

Speaker 1: 25:32

Prioritizing your own mental health is something else. So thinking about, like, what are the ways that you can demonstrate that mental health is a priority in the way that you are showing up in your work? It could be by expressing certain boundaries around time or around types of work. It could be talking about going to see your therapist. If you do that, I went to see a therapist after I had this burnout situation Cindy Lane she was on the podcast last season she fascinating episode about internal family systems, if you want to go into that. She helped me to understand psychologically what was happening with my mind and the stories that I had created in order to survive and how those stories were not actually helping me. That has led to all different kinds of work over the years on mental health and psychology and really coming to a sense of belonging, and then also spirituality as well.

Speaker 1: 26:59

So, prioritizing your own mental health and finding ways to show it, not like in a you know, I'm going to show you how I prioritize my mental health kind of a way, but living it out in a way so that people can see it, and then you can always bring on support to help. You know, if you're really going through a difficult time with your company and you're unsure how to get out of it, my friend Kat Lee is a wonderful resource, and then I have other resources that I can give to you as well. So if that's happening for you, reach out and we can find ways to support you and your team. Well, thank you so much for joining me for this little talk about mental health and the workplace. And you know, as always, take what resonates and leave what doesn't. And if you have any questions or comments or concerns or anything like that, please reach out. I would love to chat with you. Hit subscribe to know when the next episodes come out. And if you're feeling generous, please leave a review.

Speaker 1: 28:20

Reviews help other like minded folks find their way to this resource. If something you heard today brought a smile to your face or a spark to your heart and you'd like to connect with me, there are a few ways to do that. One is my newsletter, where I put most of my time and energy. When I'm not working with clients or with my family or working on this podcast Sorry, social media. The newsletter is a mix of real life stories, tips and tricks and, of course, updates on what's happening with the podcast. Whenever something's going on with me or in my business, it always comes out there first.

Speaker 1: 29:05

Another resource that I have for you is my guide to doing work differently. This guide takes you through four inquiries into how you can build a more sustainable and equitable work environment for yourself and your team. It's a great place if you're looking for somewhere to get started. Last, if you've got a burning question, a comment or a situation you'd like my eyes on, you can email me. All those links are in the show notes. Take care, brave soul, catch you next time.