Why we, in the mental health industry, need to show integrity to each other

Over the summer, I wrote a post on LinkedIn about integrity that went viral with over 100,000 views. And it's really got me thinking about the integrity of the mental health industry in which I work. And with World Mental Health Day coming up and conferences and starting this can happen MadWorld I thought this was an appropriate time to do a post about integrity in the mental health industry.

Now, I've been working in organisational health and mental health for 20 years. But it's really boomed in the past five, because there's money started to come into mental health and people started to be keen on mental health. I saw the number of providers and experts in mental health just explode.

What I also saw was people scrambling over themselves to build their businesses and make money out of mental health charities strong arming each other out the way experts kind of becoming little cliques of men's clubs and not letting people in.

Now my call to action, I guess, as we come into World Mental Health Week, and all of the activities is that actually we should be stopping to look at ourselves as an industry, how we treat each other, how we can collaborate and support each other rather than seeing each other as threats and competition.

Of course, the world of business is all about competition and money and market share. But I think our challenge, especially with the uncertainty of Coronavirus, and the fact that mental health is just exploding all over the place and that people need our services more than ever and will do going forward is how we can work together to support each other how charities can see each other as supportive and not threats, how consultants and providers and training organisations can work together. And how we can actually have adult conversations as an industry where we show integrity and support to each other. That if we're going to go into organisations, and teach them how to be better places to work that look after each other that look after their people, then we need to be supporting and looking after each other. And while others might disagree with that.

That's not often the behaviour I've seen over the last few years. I've seen instead people scrabbling each other over for clients or people's relationships being destroyed because of work. I've also seen that the big conferences often prefer the names and people that will pay for conference slots rather than the people who have necessarily the best experience or the most to say. So we're at a really interesting point.

We're a new industry. We're an industry that's trying to teach the world how to be a better, healthier and mentally healthier, better place. So let's look at how we can do that for each other and support each other and collaborate more and build the world for the next stage that we all want to see.

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