Mental Health For The People
Part 1: Starting from scratch
Around 18 months ago, one of For The People’s Co-Founders, Andy, made a confession to the creative industry:
Earlier that year he had been diagnosed with anxiety and depression.
A confession because, as he put it, that’s what it felt like. This wasn’t something that anyone was talking about in the context of work or the creative industry.
You could say that mental health — and in particular mental health in the context of work — is a topic that’s been on our minds ever since. But we’ve never addressed it head-on as a company.
At the beginning of last month we set out to build For The People’s Mental Health Policy.
Finding a framework
We’re a small, independent agency. We have no HR and no expertise in the field of mental health. So we started by forming a small working group and doing what we often do when we’re tackling a new problem — cornering people we know and extracting as much information from them as we can. We called out to friends and contacts across industries and in companies of different sizes:
Does your company have a mental health policy? If yes, what is it? Please can you share it…? 🙏
Overall, the reaction was one of interest but uncertainty.
Not many knew their company’s stance off the bat unless they’d had a personal reason to seek it out. After a few days and a couple of nudges, a few kind friends came back and shared what they could find.
Bar one stand-out exception, we found that all the policies sent back followed a similar structure. To paraphrase and keep in confidence they read something like this:
Mental health can have a major influence on your ability to be productive and perform your job to your best ability. We’re committed to promoting mental wellness in the workplace. In the case where you (or a family member) require help, we can support you through our Employee Assistance Program. In the case where you require ongoing support we will try to make reasonable adjustments to help you continue working and/or return to work.
The fact that employers offer this kind of support is fantastic. There’s nothing in NSW State or federal law that requires them do this.
But there are a few worrying points here
Mental health is framed foremost in terms of risks and/or benefits to the employer. This is all very well and good but it’s probably not the first concern for the people who the policy is speaking to and designed for — your people.
The focus is on response rather than prevention. As it stands, mental health policies are something that kick in when you have a problem. Several we saw stated the aim of promoting a mentally healthy working environment but in application all the policy points focus on targeted treatment and support for individuals.
Even then, it’s up to you to self-identify and put your hand up. Some policies gave guidance on how to recognise when a colleague may need help. But most put the duty of identification on the person affected. Speaking only from my own experience, this is problematic because the time when you most need help is often the time when you’re least able to recognise the fact.
But perhaps most worrying, is that being affected by a mental health condition is positioned as exceptional rather than normal — something to be reasonably adjusted around. Let’s be clear, suffering from a mental health condition is normal. Almost half the population normal; 45% Australians will experience mental illness in their lifetime.
It’s pretty clear we need to flip this conversation on its head.
Lifting up the carpet
There isn’t an obvious alternative solution. We know we have a lot of research, discussion and experimentation ahead of us. But we’ve got a clear aim:
Anyone can be mentally healthy or unhealthy at any point in time and we know that this changes from year to year, month to month, week to week. Because of this, we need a plan in which everyone is addressed and which prompts everyone to consider their own and others’ mental health at frequent intervals.
We also we want to shift the duty of identifying the need for help away from only the individual, to the company as whole. In fact, if we get our first objective right, it won’t even get to that point.
Ultimately, our aim is to step out of the shadows, lift the carpet and make talking about mental health at work normal.
We’re not saying it will ever be as normal as talking about lunch or weekend plans. But we would like to see it become at least as normal as talking about when you’re physically unwell — for whatever reason that may be.
What now?
Thankfully, we’re not the only ones thinking this way. Last week the NSW Government announced a new strategy aiming to address the “risk-based approach” to mental health at work. The broad aim is to shift away from reactive treatment towards proactive awareness, understanding and prevention of mental illness:
“Workplaces often respond to mental health problems once they occur, but increasingly there is a role for workplaces to prevent people from becoming unwell.”
– University of NSW Associate Professor Sam Harvey
The initiative is backed by SafeWork NSW, unions, and companies including Google and Westpac and is kicking off with two-day summit in early November to design a new blueprint for mentally healthy workplaces.
It’s great timing for us building our own policy in this context — there will no doubt be a lot of learnings that we can apply.
Alongside this, we also want to dig a bit deeper into our own industry in particular. Andy reflected on this in his post last year:
“I think it’s probably far more prevalent in our industry than we realise. And we probably do way too little to recognise, understand and do something about it.”
Over the next few months, one of our aims is to understand what mental health really looks like in the creative industry and to build specific solutions that tackle what we find.
Our plan
After this initial research, we have a loose plan:
- Asking the For The People people what they understand and how they feel about mental health
- Doing more research into resources and support materials available including: Heads-Up and Mental Health First Aid and how we might be able to apply them at FTP.
- Speaking with organisations who are already doing awesome, fresh work in the space of mental health at work including Sanctus
- Tackling the challenge of mental health in the creative and media industry — firstly taking a measure of where the industry is at now.
We’ll keep you updated and keep writing as we progress. In fact, we’ve already kicked-off point one last week by conducting a survey with the FTP people. You can read about what we found here.
We’d love to hear your feedback. Has this prompted any thoughts or ideas? Does you company have a stand-out stance on mental health? Have you seen anyone else doing great work in this space?
Do you want to join us in improving the industry? Give us a ping hello@forthepeople.agency / @ForThePeopleAu
