Leading with Panic. Why Leaders Need to Talk More Openly About Anxiety

Sanjit Sethi
Nov 5 · 5 min read

Just over twenty years ago I was diagnosed with severe anxiety / panic disorder. I have been careful to only share my struggles around this illness with a few family members and close friends. That is, until now. I am a father, husband, son, brother, curator, artist, and president of a remarkable college of art and design. I have decided to speak about this now because I am witnessing an epidemic across our academic institutions, workplaces, and communities regarding anxiety and mental illness and believe we can no longer speak about this in the third person.

Living with my panic disorder has, at times, been an absolute personal hell for me, with moments spent either in the throes of an attack or with the terror that an attack is lurking around the corner. My panic attacks have included feelings of depersonalization, nausea, heart palpitations, sweating, breathlessness, dizziness, and helplessness. It has had an indelible impact on my life. I have been fortunate enough to ascend leadership positions over the past years. However, as much as I would like to believe that my professional accomplishments have in some way inoculated me from having panic attacks, the truth is they have not. While the frequency of my attacks has greatly reduced over the years, they will never completely disappear from my world.

Despite the profusion of information about anxiety and panic disorders, they are relegated to a “I don’t see anything wrong with you” illness. I say this from personal experience. Sometimes, I have tried to share my experiences of panic disorder with people and get a response filled with incredible unease overlaid with tepid, and awkward advice: “you should try yoga,” “everyone gets butterflies,” etc. This creates more alienation that only heightens the negative feelings of anxiety-related disorders. Society would have been much more accepting if I had been wearing a cast for the past twenty years. No kidding. Our ability to understand and empathize with the kind of physical distress we can see far outweighs our capacity to feel for people with invisible illnesses. We still have a very hard time accepting the reality of disorders like panic.

I’m speaking about this now because over the past three months I’ve been fortunate enough to be the president of a college of art and design and with that leadership comes a responsibility to speak the truth no matter how uncomfortable. Cultural leaders have to support and answer to many constituents — from funders to boards to students to faculty to community partners — making it much safer to talk about mental illness as an abstract concept and not a personal lived experience. However in doing so we miss an opportunity to understand how mental illness can shape leadership.

Our society heralds traits like passion, decisiveness, strength, and integrity as essential leadership qualities. We see anything that resembles weakness to be an anathema to good leadership. I would argue that two of the most important leadership qualities that have served me over the years are vulnerability and reflection — two qualities I have become intimately acquainted with through my struggles with panic disorder. Vulnerability is a hard strength to expound upon in a job interview, or in your first interactions with your board or a new team, yet more and more I find it essential to my ability to lead in a responsible and caring way. Put simply, from my perspective vulnerability equals strength. Reflection can take an ancillary role when one thinks about leadership — it is what you do if you have time at the end of a retreat or during a spare moment between activities like planning or problem solving. Through my work in dealing with my panic attacks, I have found that reflection is a crucial quality that allows for the space of iteration, rethinking and for saying at times, “I don’t know.”

As a person of color, I am more uncomfortable talking about my struggles with anxiety / panic, even though they are an essential part of the person I have become and, I believe, a broader experience of many. There is an inextricable linkage between people of color ascending leadership roles in today’s society and the pervasive internal and personal self-questioning of whether or not they have the right to be in those very positions. The questions burrow, multiply and fester: “Are they asking me to speak because I’m a person of color and they want more diversity or because of what I am actually saying?” Hearing questions like “No, where are you really from?” over and over again calcifies over time. Like plaque on an artery it builds and has a direct relationship to creating a condition of continuous self doubt and overwhelming anxiety over whether or not you belong somewhere in the first place. This constant questioning both from outside and within is literally shredding leaders of color apart from the inside.

A little under a year ago I was meeting with a student of color and after he sat down I sensed he was feeling a great degree of unease- and I asked him if he was having a panic attack. He looked surprised and said in one quick breath “Yes, how did you know? It’s not something I feel like people understand.” In explaining that I suffered from the same affliction we were able to create a place of trust and candor about what he was facing. After our meeting was over I kept thinking about how many classes and how many meetings this individual had been in where his panic disorder was looming as an impediment to his engagement and success. There are many more like him and the greatest barrier to their fulfillment is in the culture of isolation we have built around these illnesses.

I’m writing this to offer the opening salvo for a dialogue that needs to occur on many fronts. A dialogue on how we can support and address those around us in our colleges, schools, cultural institutions and workplaces that suffer from anxiety / panic disorders, on how we need to address the undeniable linkage between race and mental health, on how we can build a culture that embraces reflection and vulnerability as strengths rather than weaknesses.

Written by

President, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, focusing on how diverse creative practitioners can work to drive positive social change.

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