Mental Health 2.0

At the risk of sounding controversial. This week, I'm going to be making my case for why I think it is time for organisational policies that talk about reducing the stigma and raising awareness of mental health to be moved on. They've had their time they've done their job, they've done great stuff, it's time to move on to a more nuanced strategic approach to mental health.

Now, I'm not trying to say that stigma doesn't still exist. But where we are as a society is that mental health is talked about daily by Royals, gymnasts, tennis players, celebrities, and when organisational mental health strategies were first coming in, it tended to be that they were trying to get the talk within an organisation. So that meant inviting a senior leader or a celebrity in to come and talk about mental health and their lived experience.

Now, this was brilliant for as we said, you know, raising awareness, making people understand that mental health is an egalitarian thing. It affects everybody. But now mental health is discussed everywhere, especially post pandemic, and wondering how useful having senior leaders or celebrities just coming in and talking about it is to employees mental health on the shop floor.

More needs to be done, we now need to have a more nuanced approach. And also one of the problems with having senior leaders and celebrities talking about it all the time, is that we have lost the nuance of what mental health is.

I think this is something that needs to be thought about as we write our new mental health 2.0 strategies, where we have strategies that address different aspects of mental health.

Now, what do I mean by that? Well, a really good example is the tool that's used for diagnosing mental illness. The DSM five, which comes from the American Psychological Association, now includes grief as a mental illness. Now, again, not trying to be controversial here. But to me, Grief is a normal emotional process that one goes through after loss, something that sadly, is probably going to happen to all of us during our lifetimes, and is a state and something that we move through, not a mental illness.

The danger with calling grief and mental illness is that that's putting it in the same bucket as schizophrenia, and bipolar. And somewhere along the way of everybody talking about mental health, we've lost the fact that schizophrenia and bipolar on one side, mild depression and anxiety are also mental illnesses. But there is a huge spectrum of human characteristics human emotions and mental illness.

So as mental health 2.0, we need to stop talking about awareness and stigma, but start thinking strategically about what organisations need to be putting in place to encourage mental wellbeing and build resilience.

What we need to be putting in place for people with mild illnesses and, and things that are starting to happen. The same with moderate illness, the same as severe illness, we need to be thinking really strategically about how we manage people in the workplace, who've got diagnosed mental health conditions that might have varying mental wellbeing at different times.

So a more nuanced approach that covers the whole spectrum of mental illness, but being really clear what that spectrum is, and that there are different scales along that. So raising the awareness and reducing the stigma was good, but I feel like we're kind of past that. Right.

You know, it's there. It's talked about, yes, it can be talked about more. Let's think about how to strategically look at the whole spectrum and to make sure that in an organisation everybody has support.

I'd love your thoughts below. As always, feel free to comment and I look forward to a healthy and robust discussion about this.

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