There was a time when no one talked about mental illness. But now conversations about mental health seem to be everywhere – in news headlines, on social media, awareness-driving events and posters in the toilets at your work. It’s undeniably a good thing that the stigma around talking mental health is fading away. But there is a still a big question mark hovering over all this ‘awareness’: how much is it helping, in real terms? Research by the Black Dog Institute found 40% of people who attempted suicide and were admitted to hospital received inadequate follow-up support after being released. Celebrity mental health ambassadors advocate against bullying on one hand, whilst defending their own racist jokes. Corporate initiatives like RUOK Day are criticised for encouraging shallow conversation that further isolates people with mental illnesses – after all, what happens if you reply to a co-worker, “honestly, I’m not.”
We need to move past the talking phase, into taking action to improve mental health in Australia. How do we do that?
Two realms of responsibility
We asked provisional psychologist Ash King how we can start making a difference to the mental health landscape in Australia. She explained the first step is understanding who can even take action to begin with. “As a practitioner, I would say that there is both a personal responsibility as well as a social systemic, organisational responsibility.”
To achieve progress, we need to get the personal responsibility and social/organisational responsibility working simultaneously.
1. Personal Responsibility
On an individual level, the key is to gain an understanding of our own mental health for ourselves. How it manifests in our bodies and our minds, understanding our feelings, what triggers and resolves them. “When we understand what we’re going through, we make it easier to know what we need at certain points, what we need to ask for, and how we need to curate our life and workspaces so that we can maintain strong mental health,” King says.
Make no mistake: depending on the challenges you’re grappling with, this can be very difficult. Acknowledging that is important. And the same methods won’t work for everyone, even among people who are experiencing the same mental illness. Because of this, there’s no alternative to discovering and trialling the specific strategies that will help you manage your mental health, so you can better express to others how they can help you.
To facilitate your own discovery, King recommends: guided support, like therapy sessions, attending courses or group workshops; solo reflective activities, like reading self-development books or doing mindfulness exercises, journalling or meditating; or incorporating movement into your day, like going for a walk in nature.
There’s nothing revolutionary in that list – we know you’ve heard it all before. But the shift comes from your intention with these activities. The goal is not for them to be the ‘solution’, but to dedicate time and space learning about your own personal mental health needs. We need to make time for this the way that we’d make time for any other essential activity in our lives. Real change starts here first.
2. Social Responsibility
It doesn’t mean mental health is your fight alone. A lot of online discourse that places full responsibility on the individual (think That Girl trend). This can feel incredibly inspiring and empowering, because it puts you in control. But it neglects the fact that our mental health is also deeply ingrained in biopsychosocial models, which surround and influence us in ways that we may not be able to directly control. Ignoring that can do us more harm than good as we continue to be in a spiral for not being ‘good enough’ on our own. You can read every self-help book out there, but if you’re still experiencing things like discrimination at work, you may well still feel like shit.
As King says: “You can’t meditate the discrimination away.”
Armed with knowledge about your specific mental health needs, it’s easier for family and friends to help support you. But for the other major community we spend most of our time in – the workplace – moving from awareness to action looks different.
Mental health in the workplace
When we asked Zee Feed readers how they felt about mental health in the workplace, the overwhelming response was that employers were failing to walk the talk. In a report from the Harvard Business Review, 91% of respondents believed a company’s culture should support mental health, up from 86% in 2019. Locally, the fourth annual Headspace Workforce Attitude to Mental Health Report found that almost 25% of Australians said their job was harming their mental health. This is happening despite the additional focus placed on mental health during the pandemic lockdowns of the past two years.
Simply talking about it is not making those numbers go down.
While many employers do offer things like yoga classes at lunch, the infamous RUOK Day morning teas, or offer meditation app subscriptions to staff alongside corporate Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs), they can still fail to take meaningful action when a staff members says they are struggling.
Is it even an employer’s responsibility to address your mental health? King says businesses need to change the way they think about ‘responsibility’ on this topic: “Say someone had an accident, at work or outside of work, where their physical health was compromised. In terms of what support is required, you need to first look at the diagnosis.” The employer and employee, together, would determine how their injury may impact their ability to do their job. Mental health challenges are no different. It is equally important to work with the individual to manage and support these same factors, regardless of whether it was caused by work or not.
Broader systemic changes to the way we approach work could make a huge, material impact to mental health too. The 4 Day Work Week Organisation is a leader in this space, listening to the needs of employees and employers and acting on it. Hazel Gavigan, Global Campaigns and Activation Officer at 4 Day Week Global, explained mental health benefits are core to their push for a four-day working week.
“The results show a better work life balance and people are generally happier and healthier when they’re working less. Not only because they have more time to themselves, but because the work in their working week is more efficient, it’s more focused. People find themselves better able to concentrate and deliver. And that itself has a positive impact on people’s stress load, which then of course, has a knock on effect on your mental health.”
Shifting to a focus on needs
To move forward, we need to shift the conversation from general ‘awareness’ to specific needs. What will help to alleviate the pressure and lessen the burden, at both the systemic and individual levels? King warns that focusing only on the big, systemic causes without also talking about the tools that will help us survive or dismantle them will only hold us back.
“In sort of activism culture, all the responsibility is on external factors. Which, again, can feel almost liberating because you’re like ‘Great, it’s everyone else’s fault – capitalism and consumerism, racism, the patriarchy and all that other stuff.’ I’m absolutely not going to argue that these forces present a lot of challenges to us living in the Western world. However, when the conversation is only centred in that space, it does disempower the individual.”
When it comes to mental health and mental illness, getting people to understand your experience is one thing – but it’s not necessarily useful unless they understand what support, help and accomodations you need.
The formula for achieving this is simple, even though it can be hard to do:
- Learn what you need, and;
- Ask for those needs to be met.
The latter can take many different forms: asking for flexible working arrangements for yourself or united with work colleagues; lobbying for policy change; protesting; joining or forming hobby groups. You may have to escalate your ask, as many groups have had to over the years… and that doesn’t guarantee your needs will be met.
But at the end of the day, these two things are all we have to do, and all we can do.
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