In this episode of the Transform Your Workplace podcast, Brandon Laws sits down with Melissa Doman, Organizational Psychology expert, to talk about the stigma of mental health and illness in the workplace. The two discuss how leaders can shift their thinking and approach to create a culture of transparency when it comes to mental wellbeing. And, as the Great Resignation continues to take its toll on businesses of all industries and sizes, it’s a conversation we can’t afford to ignore.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Melissa Doman is an organizational psychologist and former clinical mental health therapist. She has worked with clients all around the world and across virtually all industries. She is also the author of a recent no-nonsense book, Yes, You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work: Here’s Why (And How to Do it Really Well).
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
BEING PROACTIVE
“I went from having a back-end job to a front-end job,” Melissa explained. “When I used to be a clinical mental health therapist, people spoke to me in private because they didn’t feel they had the permission to talk about it.” Melissa said she felt like she was treating people “in a shrouded, broken system.” She also noticed a common theme arising in most of these conversations: people just didn’t feel comfortable broaching the topic of mental health in the workplace. This was the catalyst for Melissa’s transition into organizational psychology — she wanted to “try to make an impact at the source.”
“There are so many intervention points that are lost in the workplace,” Melissa said, due to widespread fear of talking about it. By switching into organizational psych, Melissa felt that she could “get ahead of it” so that those intervention points would no longer be glossed over.
Managing mental health should be non-negotiable, “as much as sleeping, eating, bathing, and breathing, and I think people are coming around to that.”
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
More Than Wellness
“Oftentimes, mental health is automatically and only positioned under the category of ‘Wellness at Work,’ but it’s so much more than that. It touches accessibility. It touches diversity, equity, and inclusion, it touches leadership development, it touches learning and development across the organization. This is a skill set that you can’t afford not to have.”
The Outside-of-Work Factors
“The country that you live in, the local culture that you live in, the family that raised you, religion — all these different things influence whether or not it is socially permissible to talk about mental health at all, even outside of work. So if you feel you can’t talk about it outside of work, the odds of you feeling that you can talk about it inside of work are slim to none.”
Fearing the Stigma
“People, rightfully so, are nervous about those who don’t understand mental health and mental illness — that it means they’re incapable of doing their job, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Just because you struggle with your mental health, or if you have a mental health condition, it doesn’t mean you’re not a functioning person. It doesn’t mean you’re not brilliant. Self-awareness and emotional intelligence are traits that most people would want any worker to have, but people are terrified that they’re going to be seen differently, that they’ll be treated differently, or that their career progression will get stalled.”
Getting it Right
“Mental illness is a clinically diagnosable condition. This is where you are having a certain number of characteristics happening at the same time for a certain duration of time that are interfering with your cognitive, emotional, or social functioning. Examples of mental illness are generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, addiction, anorexia, narcissistic personality disorder, and more. And people will interchange these terms when they are literally not the same thing.”
Not All Sunshine and Rainbows
“On the other hand, when it comes to mental health, it is an organ like any other organ. You want to keep it in a good health state. Or, you want to manage it when it’s in a stress state so it doesn’t progress into an illness state. But when we’re managing our mental health, it doesn’t always have to be sunshine and rainbows, because that’s not what it is to be human. We must normalize experiencing uncomfortable negative emotions so that we can move through them more naturally and to move forward.”
A Must-Have Discussion
“It’s always been a workplace issue. But businesses are realizing now that it’s a non-negotiable, must-have discussion. So I was opening up these conversations with companies even before the pandemic started, and it was gaining steam because people will reach an unsustainable point where they’re like, ‘if we don’t talk about this, I will flip a table.’ But the pandemic hit the go button and made a lot of businesses realize that they really need to talk about this, that this needs to change. It’s always been there, but now businesses are realizing that people will vote with their feet and go work for companies that do care about it.”
Who is Responsible?
“There’s a popular misconception that the entirety of the conversation [about mental health] is on the shoulders of the company and the leaders, but that’s not true.
They have the responsibility to make it explicitly clear that mental health is a value that they care about and is actually in practice. And leaders also have the opportunity to do that role modeling because people, no matter how old they are, look to their leaders for permission on what is kosher or not kosher to mention. And so with that, people forget the responsibility of the individual. Leaders in your company are not mind-readers. They’re not your nanny. They’re not there to hold your hand the entire time and make sure you don’t feel any discomfort. If they provide a safe environment, it’s up to you as an adult to take advantage of that and speak up.”
LEARN MORE
Find a copy of Melissa Doman’s book, Yes, You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work: Here’s Why (And How to Do it Really Well), on Amazon or at your preferred retailer. You can also connect with Melissa on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.