Mental health day
More than a day
Toby's experience
The relationship between mental health and work is complex and multi-dimensional.
In a previous role, while working to analyse humanitarian crises, every day I was confronted by tragedies from across the world; war, disease, and starvation. The one time in my life I had a panic attack was when, during our daily briefings, I was simply unable to process a massacre which had occurred. I spent about ten minutes in the bathroom recovering before going about my tasks like nothing had happened.
In my role working for an NGO in Japan, I have seen my colleagues care so much about supporting the students they work with, and forgetting to care about themselves. I have witnessed up close, people burning out and the pain of being unable to care anymore about their work.
These are just two examples of the ways I have seen mental health play out at work. From these, and other experiences, I believe that often we have no idea how different people are affected by different occurrences at work, be it the subject matter, the workplace relationships, or motivation for the work.
However, I believe that we do not need to know this in order to be compassionate. With what we now know about mental health, I believe there are no excuses for pretending it doesn't exist and not considering it in the workplace.
At Understorey, we believe that this is a topic that shouldn't be addressed only on one day, one week, or one month of the year. We constantly write about supporting people and their well-being in organisations, through various perspectives and examples. As such, we thought we would share a collection of articles we wrote over the last couple of years, which directly and/or indirectly addresses how we can better support mental health challenges and cultivate well-being in the workplace: