I was motivated to address this issue for 2 reasons:
1) the post from @doc_amen yesterday abt moving away from the term “mental illness”
2) the keynote address I was fortunate to be asked to give this morn at @theahl team business mtgs (slide➡️) – & the common/consistent questions I fielded after.
Doc Amen pointed out something in his post yesterday, that we discuss alll the time – & it’s so nice to see a respected doc get behind this way of thinking. Mental illness is a label. If we focus on labels it becomes something that we “don’t want to be” – so we avoid it.
Instead of mental illness, it’s ALL MH, it lives on a continuum, & we’re ALL impacted. Is there a person on this planet who doesn’t have brain health?? Is there anyone whose brain health hasn’t been impacted at all (from cognitive fog all the way to disorder)? We don’t say ppl are perfectly physically healthy until they have “physical illness”…but we do just that w MH.
After my session this morn, I had execs from 3 diff teams come up w various forms of the same question: “I’m/we’re struggling…burnt out, but our upper management doesn’t believe in it. Their attitude is if you can’t make it here w the culture we have, then this isn’t the industry for you & we’ll find someone else. How do we address that?”
The corporate sector is the slowest to change. Take “health” out of it – they don’t realize that not addressing MH is impacting performance. MH is NOT just “mental illness.” It’s brain fog, malaise, repetitive thoughts, cognitive distortions, sweaty palms. And if we’re talking performance, it leads it things like – having to read emails 4x, not being able to respond to a customer quickly, obsessing over every word in a report/project.
For the biz leaders who think their company is immune to “it” & just screen for “it,” you don’t realize how much your bottom line’s being negatively impacted. The upside of a psychologically safe culture is that ALL ppl perform better, bc we ALL deal w “it.”
If you force employees to hide it, you THINK you don’t have “it” in your office. Meanwhile you’re losing efficiency & productivity by the day.