#mhaw2016

Broaching the subject of Mental Illness at Work

I honestly don’t recall the first time I told my boss I was challenged with both anxiety and mood disorders. 

After being diagnosed, I decided to fight the stigma by telling everyone I knew (not to mention a few people I didn’t know). I was bound and determined not to be ashamed of my mental illness.

I do, however, remember the day I told him everything had become too much. My medication had stopped working and it felt as if the world collapsed in on me.

I couldn’t concentrate, I was angry, I was sad, I couldn’t stop crying, and my work was starting to suffer.

Despite the fact he had always been completely understanding and accommodating, I was incredibly nervous.  I wrestled what to say for some time.

Your condition aside, revealing your challenge with mental illness to your employer can be a struggle in and of itself.

Unfortunately, there is no clear cut answer regarding whether or not to tell them — it all depends on a number of different factors.It’s Your Decision

Mental Health Awareness - Relationships

I think it is relationships that ultimately pulled me out of the mental health system.  Relationships is a continuing  and never ending thread in our lives that can make or mar us. Loneliness is a mark of the absence of meaningful relationships.  Feeling able to talk things gives confidence. The feedback you potentially get from it can set you on the road to recovery and progress.If you do not have purpose in your relationships they can spiral out of control.  My relationship with Zoe was a catalyst to effectively building my other relationships.

Patience in Relationships

A relationship is like a house.  When the light bulb burns out, you do not go and buy a new house, you fix the light bulb. 

With a strong relationship, many things are possible.  When Chuck was eventually signed off from the mental health system, the consultant psychiatrist did acknowledge that his wife, aka me, played a role on getting to where he was.

The thing about relationships is the ability not to give up on each other.  And that takes Patience.  As much as I had to not give up on Chuck, Chuck too had to not give up on me.  Relationships  have to work both ways.  What is sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander.  Yes, Patience towards the more ‘healthy’ spouse also applies.  No one is exempt.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week, and social media is no doubt where many people – including me! – will add their voices to the campaign.

Is social media a good place to talk about mental health? It can be. But we could be doing a lot better.

Take me, for example. At least 65% of my Twitter posts are moaning about feeling depressed (the rest are just moaning more generally into the void). This may not be much fun for anybody unfortunate enough to follow me, but I find it hugely valuable to have a low-pressure, somewhat anonymous platform to vent those thoughts and feelings.

In recent weeks it has also helped me seek advice on pursuing different types of treatment. The help and support offered there has been incredible.

In this way social media can be a lifeline for people struggling with mental health issues. Be it Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or elsewhere, having a safe space to vent or ask advice can alleviate feelings of isolation, encourage someone to seek help, and just be blessedly cathartic.

Except social media isn’t always a safe space. There are trolls and idiots, of course, but this isn’t about them. Instead it’s about how talking openly about mental health on social media can be difficult for fear of saying something ‘wrong’ and having people jump on you for it.

Twitter is my social media platform of choice. Time and again I see someone make an apparently disagreeable statement about mental health and suffer the wrath of the horde. Usually it’s quite clear that the statement is misguided or poorly-worded in 140 characters rather than malicious. Yet too often the reaction is a slew of retweets with angry commentary, snide subtweets, and angry rebukes.

Mental health is a sensitive issue. But this dog-pile response doesn’t help anybody. Rather than helping the original poster understand why people are upset and giving them the opportunity to rethink and learn, they are pushed into a corner where they feel compelled to defend themselves. They only become entrenched in their original position.

Now, imagine you’re somebody struggling with their mental health, lacking a support network and turning to Twitter for help. Seeing this behaviour is only going to make you too frightened to talk openly about what you’re experiencing.

I wrote Panther to highlight the dangers of not talking about depression. By failing to speak openly about these issues, we can’t improve the level of understanding and empathy necessary to change the perception of mental health illnesses. By failing to speak openly, we give these illnesses power.

In Panther, nobody within a family struggling against the power of depression talks openly about it. They try and muddle through, pretending as best they can that everything is okay, alienating each other further day by day. In my story, the results are catastrophic.

During Mental Health Awareness Week there will be endless calls to open up about mental health. This is absolutely what we should be doing. But for this to be effective we also need to accept that it is an incredibly difficult thing to talk about. People are bound to ask questions or make statements that we find naive, misguided, and offensive.

Instead of jumping on them, let’s stay calm and do our best to help them understand and learn. Hey, it might not work! Some people don’t want to have their views challenged. At least others will see what a supportive place social media can be, and that there are people out there going through the same experiences. The value of that is immeasurable.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Week. Let’s be excellent to each other.

David Owen is the author of Panther and the forthcoming The Fallen Children.