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Tag Archives: Mental Health Strategy

Recovery-from-Mental-illness

What Does ‘Recovery’ Mean?

22/09/2016

Often, when I deal with health professionals and people in training, I get a range of responses when they learn that people can recover from mental disorder. Some are surprised, some intrigued by the concept since they’ve never heard it before and others oppose the idea of recovery with a vengeance. Why? What’s going on?

The concept of ‘Recovery’ from mental health problems has been around for hundreds of years, and yet for many people, the fact that people do recover from mental disorders is something that still surprises many people.

There are many reasons for this, not the least of which is that the traditional model of psychiatry has explicitly stated that people do not recover. We now have oodles of research showing that this simply isn’t true. But nonetheless, the misconception persists.

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The term ’Recovery’ has a long political, social, and clinical history, and its meaning has been much debated particularly over the last 10 to 20 years. I won’t go into the details now, (I could write a whole book on it, and probably will one day).

For now, what you need to know is that the term ‘Recovery’ has particular meanings within the mental health sector (even though many working in that sector still do not understand it fully).

So here is my attempt to summarize some pretty complex ideas, into a few simple explanations of what ‘Recovery’ means to us here at the Workplace Mental Health Institute:

The Recovery approach adopted by the Workplace Mental Health Institute emphasizes and supports a person’s potential for recovery.

1. We believe Recovery is not only possible, it’s probable.

    1. Research over the last hundred years is showing that on average around 57% of people with severe mental health problems do recover. And the statistics are much better for people with less severe mental distress, those who get help early, and with newer therapeutic modalities now available.

2. We view mental distress as mostly psychological, social or spiritual in nature, not as an illness. Though there maybe physical consequences and interactions.

    1. Treatment therefore can come from a range of alternatives. We are all unique and one size does not fit all.

3. We focus on ability, not disability.

    1. A person experiencing mental distress has strengths, skills and personal characteristics despite their current emotional state. Research indicates that when people recover from a mental health problem, they are actually more productive at work than they were before becoming unwell, due to their increased resilience, and strategies learned.

4. We define Recovery as the absence of severe or abnormal distress, and the presence of positive emotions and wellness.

    1. Everyone has some stress from time to time, but if mental ill-health is defined as severe emotional distress, then recovery would mean the person no longer experiences that level of distress.

Author: Peter Diaz
Peter-Diaz-AuthorPeter Diaz is the CEO of Workplace Mental Health Institute. He’s an author and accredited mental health social worker with senior management experience. Having recovered from his own experience of bipolar depression, Peter is passionate about assisting organisations to address workplace mental health issues in a compassionate yet results-focussed way. He’s also a Dad, Husband, Trekkie and Thinker.

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Mental Health for Bottom Line

Taking care of the bottom line through good mental health

12/07/2016

I was reading an article from the UK about a lady who had a mental health crisis working in the retail industry, with a strict employer who constantly demanded their minimum wage employees push clients to spend thousands of pounds in one transaction. She talks about the high turnover rates among the 100 plus employees, and the impact the working environment had on her mental health.

And it got me thinking – how many employers are there out there who spend such a huge portion of their time, effort and resources focussing on creating sales, to generate higher and higher income, while at the same time they completely forget that the ways in which they treat their staff can end up costing them much, much more. Turnover is just one aspect of this – the cost of recruitment, and time spent hiring and training up a new employee. But then if it’s not a good working environment, it won’t be long before they are spending on more sick leave and having to replace that employee too. Not to mention the costs involved if someone actually puts in a stress claim! That can be a huge drain on the business.

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And it’s not necessarily that managers or businesses are bad or evil. They are people too. And they are likely doing their best to keep everything running, to keep people in jobs. There is a lot of stress involved there too, and sometimes, in cases like this it can filter down to the frontline staff. Before you know it it’s a downward spiral.

BUT!!! it can so easily be reversed by:

1. Training managers in how to better support people within the workplace.

2. Making sure the managers have the support of the executive team – that they are committed to addressing mental health and wellbeing

3. Communicating the plan clearly to all staff, and following through.

Not only will this directly help the bottom line in terms of generating more income – the evidence is very clear that with a healthy and happy workforce, productivity, customer service, and all the other good stuff increases dramatically. But it will also have a huge impact in terms of the money saved in all those places where it is just being drained at the moment.

And besides the financial incentive, what about the fact that the people working in the business are real people too, with thoughts and feelings? Work is such a huge part of our lives, why not make it a pleasurable place to be, rather than one staff dread coming to each day. Now of course it doesn’t mean that you’ll stop all mental health problems – people are still people, and they still have personal lives too, but when someone does have something difficult happening in their personal life, the approach of the manager at work can make all the difference as to whether they spiral downwards and end up needing time off or whether work can become a haven for the person. This makes all the difference not just for the person, but for the business too.

Author: Peter Diaz
Peter-Diaz-AuthorPeter Diaz is the CEO of Workplace Mental Health Institute. He’s an author and accredited mental health social worker with senior management experience. Having recovered from his own experience of bipolar depression, Peter is passionate about assisting organisations to address workplace mental health issues in a compassionate yet results-focussed way. He’s also a Dad, Husband, Trekkie and Thinker.

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we-didn't-do-anything-wrong

We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost

30/06/2016

Remember Nokia? I had a couple of their mobile phones once upon a time. One of my favourite phones, in fact. It was small, sleek, silver. Easy to carry. Easy to use. And stylish. It was perfect until…smartphones came on the scene. Why do I tell you this?

The CEO of Nokia in May admitted defeat saying, ’we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost’. Why? New ways of doing things; the fickleness of human nature – we like something one minute, we dislike it the next; and then…some not so clever decisions. Is there something to be learnt here? How is this related to mental health at work?

Well, while Nokia may claim to be innocent and a victim of circumstances, is it accurate to say that ‘we didn’t do anything wrong’? Let’s have a look.

Undoubtedly, Nokia was big. Had tremendous resources. It also had a problem many organisations share – they get complacent. Here are some comments people have made as to what went wrong (and see how that matches against some poor approaches to mental health in workplaces):

‘They were reactive instead of responsive’. A common mistake in mental health too. Companies wait till there is a crisis, then they act – IF they act. Often the attitude continues to be, ‘let’s wait and see’.

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“They thought ‘We are Nokia – we have all the engineering know-how in-house we don’t need developers”. This is another common one. The education of staff on mental health issues is carried out in-house. There are some problems with this approach – can you think of some? Too often this work is delegated to someone that hasn’t got the expertise but likes the topic as a ‘hobby’. And even if the expertise is there, is that their job? Usually people have full time jobs and training is added onto their busy schedule, making the mental health training program unlikely to succeed.

“They didn’t try anything new.” In mental health, if what you do isn’t working, you have to try something new. Some organisations have tried one thing – a mental health morning tea, or a couple of posters, and didn’t get the result they wanted. It might have been a great initiative for a little while, but soon everyone forgot about it and went back to business as usual.

“They failed Deliver with Speed and Simplicity”. Too often leadership teams lack an understanding of what is needed in mental health and wait to have all the information. When this is lacking, either the decision is delayed, with negative results for the business and the bottom line, or; the job is given to some ‘big’ mental health organisation as a means to shift the responsibility onto them (we tried…we gave it to ‘what’s-its-name’). The good news – you don’t need all the data to make decisions – just enough to see the benefits. A sense of urgency is important to get the results.

So, what do we learn from Nokia? Don’t be like Nokia. Learn, innovate and take action. Call me and let’s have a chat.

Have a mentally healthy day!

Author: Peter Diaz
Peter-Diaz-AuthorPeter Diaz is the CEO of Workplace Mental Health Institute. He’s an author and accredited mental health social worker with senior management experience. Having recovered from his own experience of bipolar depression, Peter is passionate about assisting organisations to address workplace mental health issues in a compassionate yet results-focussed way. He’s also a Dad, Husband, Trekkie and Thinker.

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3 Occasions Managers Should Not Be Trained in Mental Health

3 Occasions Managers Should Not Be Trained in Mental Health

08/05/2016

Even though there’s enough evidence now pointing to the fact that managers are key to an organisation’s mental health, and that having good mental health in the workplace actually contributes to the bottom line, this doesn’t mean all managers should be trained in mental health.

Granted, most managers would do well in getting specialised manager mental health training, but not in all cases. And here are 3 of those cases:

1. If the manager’s a dick

Yes, you heard right. Sorry I had to get rough. But I hear all the time from people how they’ve been hurt by a boss who didn’t care how their actions impacted on others. Or worse, how they seemed to relish hurting other team members. No amount of training is going to get someone to care when they enjoy hurting others.  If a manager has psychopathic leanings and actually enjoys making people suffer, then good mental health training is wasted on such a person. The most effective thing to do with this type of manager is to remove them from the organisation quickly.

Then the organisation should provide good quality, empowering mental health education for the rest of the people, to help undo the damage caused by such individuals.

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2. If the organisation is not committed

If an organisation’s CEO and leadership team are not on board with good mental health training and don’t see it’s impact on it’s bottom line, (or ‘mental wealth’ as we like to call it), then it’s probably not going to be as effective, since managers could be caught in the double bind of having more knowledge than their bosses but lacking the authority to act on it.

How this problem would be addressed is by someone in the leadership team championing the mental health cause. Preferably the CEO but usually the Director of HR or the Director of WHS. (PS. If you need help preparing for this or you would like to brainstorm ideas with me, please contact my office for a chat)

3. If the training is illness based

A lot of workplace mental health education is ‘illness’ based. It focuses on disability not ability. This type of message is not only wrong and unethical but it undermines the manager’s ability to manage and drive their team.

To improve a team’s ability to produce, and impact the bottom line, it’s mental wealth, the manager needs to know not just what to look for, how to identify mental health issues arising, but also how to utilise what’s coming up in their team effectively, and how to create a healthy workplace that will support the person to stay at work and build their resilience, rather than responding by sending the person away til they are ‘better’.

In the field of mental health, there are two overarching approaches to mental health – one that is illness driven, the other one is strengths focussed. You do the math. You decide which one will provide you with the best tools to lead your team.

Author: Peter Diaz
Peter Diaz profile

Peter Diaz is the CEO of Workplace Mental Health Institute. He’s an author and accredited mental health social worker with senior management experience. Having recovered from his own experience of bipolar depression, Peter is passionate about assisting organisations to address workplace mental health issues in a compassionate yet results-focussed way. He’s also a Dad, Husband, Trekkie and Thinker.

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Pillar-3-Nothing-about-me-without-me

Building a Mentally Healthy Workplace: 3rd Pillar

05/10/2015

A lot of managers ask me ‘Peter, how can we tell if someone REALLY has got a mental illness?’ They want to know if they are being manipulated and taken advantage of. Have you ever walked away with the feeling that someone was taking advantage of you in this area? It’s possible. And today I will show you how you can minimise these occurrences.

The secret to protect yourself and your team from manipulation and harassment claims; to boost your teams performance to unprecedented levels and get unique wisdom as to what really is going in your team relies on the application of Pillar 3 of the 7 Pillars of a Mentally Healthy Workplace.

Pillar 3 is Nothing About Me Without Me.

It is common for teams, due to the pressures of the work environment, to not quite get each other, start competing with each other detrimentally and for distrust to creep into the dynamics of the team. And Distrust is the toxic fume that Pillar 3 – Nothing About Me Without Me, focuses on. As a leader, you want to eradicate from your team any cause for distrust in your team. Both between team members and yourself. Distrust is the cancer of a high performing team. You must get rid of it. But, how do you do that?

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One thing a lot of managers don’t understand is that, one of the first, if not THE first, thing that suffers when people become distressed and mentally unwell is REAL TRUST in the relationship they have with their boss and with other team members. They don’t lose all trust but they lose trust that their relationship with you and others is robust enough for them to communicate openly and honestly; and they’ve lost trust that you have their back. Most managers miss this. And why wouldn’t they? They are not supposed to know, they are not Mental Health experts. By the way, this is missed by most mental health experts too! This is where Pillar 3 comes in so handy.

Pillar 3 makes the bold but well supported assertion to introduce real transparency into the way you communicate in your team. As an effective way to build trust, it says stop talking about others and bring them into the conversation from very early on.

Great advice.

Usually, when a staff member start showing signs and symptoms that something is not mentally well, many managers panic and go and talk to someone else. It is possible that it may have come to their attention because someone else raised it. And then they proceed to talk to others, maybe HR or their senior supervisor, trying to get direction on what to do. By the time the staff member with the problem is approached, very often others have had robust conversations during which decisions have been made…on the life and career of someone else not present – the staff member in distress. This doesn’t go well in building trust. Why?

Several reasons:

  • Contributes to the paranoia of the staff member: Who Else Is Talking About Me?
  • Having the person in conversations contributes to transparency
  • Its a sign of respect. Respect shows the person they are valued
  • It protects you from reaching the wrong conclusions about what is really going on. Oftentimes what is going on is not so bad and can be addressed easily if we work together as a team
  • Competency and confidence goes a long way to increase trust in your abilities; and they both get a better chance when aided with transparency

And these are just some of the very good reasons as to why creating a culture of inclusion, Nothing About Me Without Me, can have a positive impact on your attempts to create a mentally healthy culture.

Its a nice and efficient way to let your team know that you have their back and you trust them. When was the last time that happened to you? Felt good, right? That’s what we are encouraging you to do.

At our Workplace Mental Health Masterclass for Leaders, we operationalise this pillar and we show managers how to take their skills to the next level. If you’ve done this Masterclass, you know what we are talking about, right? If you haven’t, I invite you to join us for the next Workplace Mental Health Masterclass for Leaders.

I hope to see you soon and remember to be nice to each other.

Author: Peter Diaz
Peter Diaz profile

Peter Diaz is the CEO of Workplace Mental Health Institute. He’s an author and accredited mental health social worker with senior management experience. Having recovered from his own experience of bipolar depression, Peter is passionate about assisting organisations to address workplace mental health issues in a compassionate yet results-focussed way. He’s also a Dad, Husband, Trekkie and Thinker.

Connect with Peter Diaz on:
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