Lauren McQuade: on mental health in the workplace - a personal story.

When I look back on this time in my career, the primary feeling I have for myself now is compassion.   But it certainly wasn’t always the case.  There were many times in the months following my leaving that I felt a deep sense of shame and embarrassment that my colleagues had ‘seen me that way.’

Three years ago, I took up a temporary position with a large financial services company while I was waiting to hear about another potential work opportunity. My temporary contract was for six weeks, but the team were very pleased with my performance and asked me to stay on for the remainder of the year.  Just prior, I had found out that the other opportunity wasn’t materialising, so I agreed.

I’m not quite sure at what point things started to deteriorate.  In the background, there were several stresses that I was struggling to process - a series of bereavements that had taken place before starting the job and moving back to my hometown after many years away, which I saw as a backward step at the time.

But I decided to make the best of it, and when a new senior Director started, I put myself forward to take the lead for an important project within my team.  I hoped that I would do an excellent job of it and that my contract would become permanent.  Although I had a deep sense that this wasn’t where I wanted to be in the long term, I needed some certainty, and so being kept on permanently became my next goal.  I quickly became one of the first people in the office in the morning and one of the last to leave each night.  I was putting myself under a lot of pressure, and I had started taking myself off to quiet corners of the office away from my colleagues as I ‘needed to concentrate.’  What was beginning to build in the back of my mind was a feeling of overwhelm and in all honesty, the start of a relapse with my mental health.

Ironically, looking back, it was around this time that I was aware that the company was looking for a small number of people to become Mental Health First Aiders.  They were training them up, and the person in our team was someone that I got on with on a surface level, but not someone I had ever been close to or confided in. They undertook the training, and then I don’t remember hearing much more about it after that.   With the pressure of the work project, my very uncertain future, and the stresses that I had not dealt with from the preceding months, I really started struggling with a lot of difficult emotions.  I became quite paranoid, my work relationships were suffering, and I was bottling up a lot these troubling emotions.

There was one morning in particular when I came into the office and felt utterly unable to function.  I remember going to the toilet and just sitting with my head in my hands.  It felt like the room was spinning around me.  Colleagues must have noticed that I was behaving quite out of character, but nobody approached me and asked me if there was something wrong.  That day, I ended up asking if I could go home, which my Manager agreed to after he asked me to participate in a phone call.  To me, this reaction illustrated a distinct absence of understanding as to what was happening to me. Nobody uttered a word.

For the next couple of weeks, my mental health continued to deteriorate, the paranoia intensified, and, I felt isolated from the rest of my team.  I was making some headway with my project but not enough.  Despite my struggles, I never at any point considered or felt able to talk to the Mental Health First Aider.  I was unsure myself about what was happening, so how could I possibly talk to someone about it, let alone to someone with whom I didn’t have a meaningful connection, which is why I have little faith in the whole concept of Mental Health First Aid.  I think it would have been much more helpful if both of my managers had been trained to spot the warning signs and taken the time to talk to me.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and the pressure cooker was building, and I wasn’t coping at work at all.  I couldn’t concentrate; I was away from my desk more than I was at it.  My emotions inside were volatile, and I just remember feeling so disconnected from everyone in the office.  Within days, the lid of the pressure cooker blew off, something triggered me, and I walked out.  To this day, I can’t even tell you what it was that happened.  That was my last day.  

The purpose of this post is not to point any fingers.  I think the managers I had at the time did their best with the knowledge and skills that they had.   But, I do feel strongly that Mental Health First Aiders did not help me and that there was a distinct lack of communication around what was happening; nobody raised any questions about my mental health.  It was as if there was the elephant in the room, and my colleagues were not prepared, equipped or able to acknowledge what was happening to me, nor did they feel able to talk about it. I couldn’t either.

So what might have helped?  I do feel that my managers could have benefitted from having a bit more knowledge and the courage to address the fact that even in the short few months they had known me, something didn’t seem right and, I wasn’t the employee they had asked to stay on months previously. Was there anything going on? How was I coping? Have I ever had problems with my mental health before?  These would have been good questions to ask and for me to answer. 

There was still a stigma, and I worried deeply that if people knew about the fact that I’d suffered mental health problems before they would judge me differently.  Would they want someone like that as a permanent employee?  I feel disappointed in myself to say that, but it was at the forefront of my mind. 

My experience has taught me that we absolutely MUST bring mental health into the heart of organisations.  Mental health cannot be hidden away in the corner; we need to feel able to share openly without the fear of being judged.  In my opinion, open dialogue, absence of fear, acceptance and non-judgement are what we need to make core elements of our approach to mental health in the workplace.  With those core elements, we’ll be able to effectively provide a solid support structure AROUND employees, giving them the best chance of talking openly and addressing their problems.