Your Mind at Work

My first job out of college was at a community mental health center that served people across five counties. During the day, I co-ran an outpatient day program that aided people dually diagnosed with mental health disorders and developmental disabilities with life and social skills. In the late afternoons, I would travel from one county to the next to see our Deaf clients as I was the only care manager that could sign. It was a stressful schedule, but I loved my job.

A year and a half into this position, my father passed away suddenly. The grief was overwhelming for my family. I stayed with my mother every night for the first several weeks, often sleeping next to her, holding her when she woke up looking for Dad, not realizing he was gone. The funeral was a blur.

I hadn’t bothered to look up how many bereavement days work provided because I was a new adult worker and was under a false assumption that such a tragedy would be given some grace. On the fourth day after my dad passed, my boss called me and asked me if I’d like to take a day off without pay. I was confused. What do you mean, I asked? My Dad just died, I insisted.

She told me their policy was three bereavement days, and after that I had to take vacation time (I didn’t have any because I’d recently been on my honeymoon and had taken all my paid time off. My Dad died two weeks after he walked me down the aisle.) I was stunned. And outraged. But I was also poor. My salary back then was just shy of twenty thousand and my husband’s job didn’t pay much more. We lived paycheck to paycheck, and I couldn’t afford to take a full day without pay. So, I went back to work with tear-stained cheeks and red eyes.

I remember quite clearly that first morning back to work. I sat with my day treatment clients, coughing to keep myself from crying, trying to keep my voice steady. They asked me if I was all right. I was honest with them. I shared how my father had died, and I was grieving. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they launched into their own stories of loss. It was a powerful healing moment. They comforted me when the tears spilled despite my best efforts to keep them trapped in my eyes. It felt wrong, taking comfort from my clients whose lives I was supposed to somehow make better during this time when I was weak. Yet, it also felt right, and human, accepting their gifts of strength and support. I knew I shouldn’t be at work, that I should have been somewhere private, with my family, while the acute phase of my grief wrecked me.

That was twenty-eight years ago, and bereavement policies aren’t much better today.

However, mental health awareness has grown exponentially, and some companies have started something new: mental health days. Sometimes, these days are called “personal days” or “self-care days” and are blended with paid time off (PTO). Some companies have restructured their PTO so that employees have more discretion and privacy when they need time to grieve, attend therapy appointments, take mental health days, or just relax their minds and bodies. However, these companies are in the minority.

For this week’s ThriveMind article, I wanted to dig into the research on the effectiveness of workplace mental health days—do they increase employee attitudes, productivity, and workplace relationships? To my surprise, there isn’t much research to be found. Instead, there are quite a few articles that explore mental health in the workplace. My guess is there isn’t enough consistency across workplace mental health support models other than benefits (employee assistance program/therapy) to study the specific effects of mental health days off. Instead, I focused on mental health in the workplace to see where that would lead.

A 2023 report from Mind Share Partners, a workplace mental health research institute, suggests that although companies are offering more self-care benefits such as days off and wellness apps, what they really want is a healthy, safe, and supportive culture at work. But what does this look like?

A randomized controlled trial of company manager mental health training sheds some light on this issue. When compared to controls, companies whose managers were trained experienced a significant reduction in employee mental health-related absenteeism as a result of trained managers’ increased knowledge, response skills, and attitudes toward workplace mental health needs. The findings of this study were further evaluated with a meta-analysis of similar research. When bosses are trained and feel more competent and confident to address their employees’ mental health conditions, workers feel more supported on the job and may experience a reduced need to stay home for self-care.

Unfortunately, Mind Share’s report divulged a downward trend in employer support of mental health needs post-pandemic. Employees reported that their comfort in speaking with their senior managers about their mental health decreased by half since 2021, with 49% of employees feeling that their workplace supports their mental health needs. Mind Share explains this as the “return to work” post-pandemic with a push for increased productivity to compensate for the pandemic losses.

Recently, I read a Reddit post from a professor who was afraid to disclose their mental illness to their department chair. This person’s therapist had cautioned against reporting their diagnosis, stating that if it doesn’t affect their job performance, keeping it undisclosed might be the best move in today’s university environment. The comments from the post respondents supported keeping the diagnosis a secret, as many who’d previously disclosed had suffered consequences. Being a professor myself, I was surprised. Perhaps I’m lucky, I thought, to have an understanding and supportive department chair. I’m in the social sciences, after all, and several of my colleagues study mental health like I do. Work culture and environment matters.

I’m acutely aware of the lack of support of most companies when it comes to mental health. During a talk I gave last week to a group of young men at one of our university fraternities, I spoke about workplace mental health culture as something they should consider examining when they eventually find themselves on the job market. They acknowledged how difficult it is to talk about their mental health openly, even in the comfort of their fraternity brotherhood. It will become even more challenging in a cutthroat work environment and this is something they can prepare for now, I told them. If they land in an unsupportive work culture, as many of them studying business, economics, and engineering likely will, they will want to build their mental health literacy and coping skills toolbox now. Develop your support network, I said. Create your safety nets and your self-care skills.

If any of you have seen the show Billions and remember the “performance coach” who met individually with the hedge fund managers to enhance their productivity, this is NOT what we’re talking about when we describe a mental health culture. Granted, that was a television show, and she was more of a fixer than a therapist, but this kind of environment is a cautionary tale, even if it’s fictitious. This is the kind of dream many of these young fraternity men have—make millions of dollars, hide your emotions, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It’s when those bootstraps turn into an alcohol addiction or depression and suicidal thoughts that everything looks clearer in the rearview mirror.

Mind Share’s report offers solutions for employers who want to retain their talent by building a supportive environment. Among these solutions is to “Embed mental health into strategy, systems, and practices.” Although health management in companies is often handled by HR departments, Mind Share proposes that mental health should be woven throughout a company’s practice (recruiting, onboarding, performance) at all levels. Building a culture of mental health happens from the ground up.

An article from Indeed, the popular recruitment platform, suggests advocating for yourself if your mental health is impacting work productivity. They offer some key signals that things are going awry and tips to have an open conversation with your supervisor. I found this to be somewhat helpful, but the reality is that most people, like the professor on Reddit, will worry that disclosing will haunt them and cause even more of a burden on their mental health. This means that without a culture shift, people will continue to suffer in silence.

The stark reality is that mental health inequities in the workplace are costly. According to the Deloitte Institute, by 2040, these inequities will cumulatively cost the country nearly 14 trillion dollars in lost revenue (lost productivity, treatments, days off, and lives lost). That’s over forty thousand dollars per person over the next fifteen years. These data scream for a workplace culture shift, especially when the cost of not changing will, in the long term, be exceedingly more expensive than building a supportive work environment. So what keeps companies from making and sustaining this type of change? In my humble opinion, most companies remain myopic. They’re focused on the now when it comes to their culture and the future when it comes to their financial projections. If they wed these two concepts and conclude that investing in employee mental health now will increase productivity and revenue in the future, they may just hit the jackpot.

In the meantime, we must continue to fill our own mental health toolbox with skills, supports, and resources that allow us to work. This includes noticing when we’re not feeling right emotionally instead of ignoring it. Increase our mental health literacy so we can describe how we feel, name it, claim it. Find a listening partner who we can share our weekly stresses with and blow off steam and receive and give comfort. Engage in natural serotonin and dopamine enhancing activities, such as exercise, pleasure and leisure time, nature, and social outings. Create a self-care calendar and protect your joy- and pleasure-seeking time. LAUGH. I prescribe laughter to all my students. I build laughter into my courses. It’s a simple and effective release.

When your work world is taking from you more than you’re getting from life, it’s time to reset. Take some days off. Or even one day off. Shut off that phone. No emails. No texts or calls. Plan a day of fun, laughter and joy. Protect that day like it’s made of gold. Because you’re gold.