Shattered Dreams

Thoughts about Mental Health Awareness

Do You Really Want To Hurt Me?

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week* in the UK (It's Mental Health Awareness Month in the US. They always have to go bigger, right?) and I think we should be talking about the impact that work has on our mental health.

Work can be good for your mental health, providing you with a sense of meaning, self-worth, belonging, connection, achievement, mastery and personal growth. The financial rewards of work can also provide you with a sense of safety, financial security and the means to enjoy your life.

That’s what work can do for you. However, that doesn’t seem to be what it does for most people.

Work is a significant cause of poor mental health and this is a problem that has arisen in the past two or three decades. Indicators of this are the usage of the phrase ‘workplace stress’, which barely appears before 1980 but then rises exponentially to today where it is ubiquitously applied ; and the definition of ‘Burnout’ as ‘an occupational phenomenon’ by the WHO in 2019.

The much maligned ‘Health and Safety’ legislation was introduced to reduce the levels of accidents and deaths that were routinely happening in workplaces. Those where places where physical labour took place, in coal-mines, steel works, factories, building sites. Many of these were preventable and it was decided that this level of harm would not longer be tolerated. Today, work place accidents are rare, and fatalities have been reduced to a minimum.

Of course, part of the reduction is in part because far fewer people work in those environments, as our economy has moved from heavy industry and manufacturing to services. Now people mostly work in offices or their homes, sitting at desks and using computers.

However, whilst these environment appear clean and safe, they have become just as harmful. The physical injuries suffered on the shop floor or at the coal face are no more but have been replaced by far more insidious and hidden harms. The dangers are less apparent, the wounds much less visible but they are no less real.

Led by Australia and New Zealand, there are moves to legislate to ensure employers have workplaces that support good mental health, a similar approach to that has been taken to prevent physical harms. Whether this is the right approach is open to debate but it is a recognition that this is a real and current problem that is not only harmful to the individuals but also to society and the economy.

Addressing this is the smart thing to do. It’s also, and in my view more importantly, it’s the right thing to do.

*at time of writing. It ran 15-21 May 2023.

Road To Nowhere

‘Misery machines’ is what Prof. Antoinette Weibel calls modern organisations and it’s an appropriate label, isn’t it?

It’s worth asking how this has come about. Is it by design or accident?

I would say it’s a bit of each. It’s an inevitable consequence of the late stage capitalism we see today, it’s what the neoliberal model is designed to deliver (not that you will ever hear its proponents say as much in public). As wealth is funnelled up to the top, then life becomes more precarious for those at the bottom, who’s incomes are held down whilst their cost of living increases. These pressures are now coming to bear on those higher up the income scale, who never thought they would have to struggle to get by.

It’s also the outcome of the interplay between the ‘Forces of Crapification’ that have been affecting work over the past 40 years. These are:

Putting profits before people

The doctrine of ‘Shareholder Primacy’, which is part of the neoliberal ideology, has justified things like stack-ranking, forced lay-offs, reducing employee benefits and a swathe of dehumanising practices that were previously unthinkable.

Valuing efficiency over effectiveness

The relentless pursuit of efficiency has driven the objectification of employees as mere cogs in the machine, which is being constantly run harder and harder. This depersonalisation is encapsulated in the term ‘Human Resources’. Despite all the rhetoric, people only matter as much as their contribution to output and they are interchangeable and replaceable. It’s a denial of the uniqueness of each human being.

An obsession with process and measurement

Also know as ‘the curse of the MBAs’. Much of what is valuable and human in work evades measurement and process definition. The relationships between people, the interworking of teams, the shared moments of being. As such, these are not valued and even discouraged in the workplace.

The spread of mobile phones and the ‘always on’ culture

This has led to the blurring of boundaries and a spreading of the working day, robbing employees of the time for restoration and relaxation and increasing levels of chronic stress. This negatively impacts both health and performance.

Tech replacing human interaction

It used to be that when you wanted to communicate with someone you had to talk to them, either in person of by phone. Now many of our interactions happen through email and the like, or are mediated through other platforms. We have lost of many of the micro-interactions with our coworkers that are good for our mental health. The rise of ‘workplace isolation’ as a problem is a most obvious symptom of this.

Increasing work loads, hours and stress

The pressure to run the machine even harder to produce the profits demanded by those at the top has led to a relentless increase in demands put on employees. People are simply being overloaded, as show by the emergence of Burnout as a work-related condition.

Design or accident? I’ll let you decide. What I will say is that it is not inevitable and it’s certainly not sustainable. We need to shut down the misery machines and build something better.

Feelings

The stigma around poor mental health is reducing but those affected still get less attention and compassion than people afflicted with a physical health condition. It is often said that this is because the latter is more obvious and visible. It’s easy to see if someone has a broken leg but harder to tell if they are suffering from anxiety.

There’s undoubtedly some truth in this (plus people are very good at hiding their anxiety, for example) but it’s also true that mental and physical health are deeply interwoven and poor mental health has many physical symptoms.

I was completely unaware of this, and so didn’t realise that I was struggling with my mental health. Well, when I say I didn’t realise, I knew I wasn’t at my best and was finding things hard as I tried to transition out of corporate and build my coaching practice. I knew I was feeling a bit off at times but I dismissed it. Head down, push harder, that was my default approach at the time.

The penny didn’t drop until I read about Mike Yardy, an England cricketer who had returned from the World Cup the day before the final due to ‘mental health problems’. Like many, my response was “Surely he could have stuck it out for another day, to play in what is the biggest match in his career?”.

The journalist had asked a psychologist how this might have affected Yardy’s game and it included a comprehensive list of possible physical effects arising from poor mental health (and I think, specifically, anxiety). As I read through the list, my head began nodding at the ones I recognised, as it slowly dawned on me that I’d experienced most of them. If I’d been playing ‘mental health bingo’, I would have shouted ‘House!” before I’d got the bottom!

It seems utterly ridiculous now but I was genuinely unaware of how your mental health manifests itself physically. Needless to say, this was a wake-up call and I sought some help. However, part of me still resisted the idea and tried to dismiss it (which is not a great way to approach therapy but that’s another story).

Now, I can not only spot the signs in myself (well, literally feel them), I notice them in others. I’m much more aware and attuned to them and I listen to my intuition more. We know when someone’s not right in themselves, if we allow ourselves to.

I can see now that I experienced many of these symptoms in the workplace but just dismissed them as stress and self-medicated down the pub after work with colleagues who felt the same. It’s mad, now I think back on it. However, talking about mental health, even amongst each other, was taboo. It would be seen as weakness and likely to have an adverse affect on your career.

Thankfully, we’ve moved on from those days but some of those attitudes still linger, particularly amongst the ‘alpha males’. On the debit side of the ledger, however, is that the impact on work on our mental health is greater both in effect and scope, affecting many more people. Maybe we talk about it today because it’s become impossible to ignore, impossible to sweep under the carpet.

That’s not exactly progress, is it?

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

What I find one of the most depressing aspects about the conversation around mental health in the workplace is that it is framed in the context of productivity, with the subtext that spending money on the mental health of your employees is good for the bottom line. It’s just the ‘Profits over People’ wolf being put in sheep’s clothing.

There was a time when companies looked after their employees because it was the right thing to do. For those that didn’t, there was legislation to ensure minimum standards. The prevailing business ethic was that you had a responsibility, as a company, to care for your people and for the environment you operated in. It was a more paternalistic outlook and that had its own drawbacks but it was based on moral responsibility.

Today, the prevailing business ethic is that anything goes as long as you hit the numbers. People are disposable, no longer assets but mere inputs. The purpose of business is to make profit, that’s all (thanks for nothing, Milton Friedman).

This has to change. Work can, and must, become a place of human flourishing, an environment that people can grow and develop in and realise their potential. It should be a positive aspect of people’s lives, not something to be endured so that you can enjoy whatever you have left after it has depleted you.

The dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution were eventually consigned to the past as it was recognised that people’s physical health should not be endangered in the cause of mere commerce. Today, we have dark satanic mills of the mind and it is no more acceptable that people be damaged and sacrificed to serve the gods of profit. People’s mental wellbeing is worth more than that. In fact, it’s priceless.