Encouraging people to learn about positive mental health is a fundamental belief at CorePartners (that’s why we partner with PsyTech VR | Mental Health system). In this, we’ll do a deep dive into the how and why mindfulness should be encouraged in professional settings.

Why Should You Teach About Mental Health?

Wait, is it really appropriate to speak about this in a professional setting? One may ask to a resounding yes, and the reason being is mental health impacts everything about a person, from productivity, to mood, and can even make them physically sick. Much like how an illness takes people out of work, mental health can have a similar impact on an employee—only over a longer time and harder to notice.

Mental health does have more caveats than most physical illnesses, as mental health issues tend to last much longer (sometimes forever) and do not have as immediate of effect on productivity. However, if uneducated, people suffering will not be able to identify their mental health issues, enabling spiraling.

Learning Makes It Less Taboo

Mental health has often been subject to social taboos, preventing it from being discussed in many places where it ought to be predominate, like work or school. This awkwardness naturally leads to misunderstandings and unfortunate silences regardless of what may be impacting your employees, peers, or learners. So, how do we break down these taboos?

Well, by learning about mental health. It may sound like a cop-out but it’s true, after all, how would you describe a feeling if didn’t know all the vocabulary you have now? Furthermore, by instructing people about it, those doubts of one being crazy or helpless are planted.

Avoiding It Has Damaging Outcomes

Mental health issues can have damaging outcomes for both the suffering and those around them. One thing needs to be made clear: not acknowledging it doesn’t mean its not happening, it just means you won’t be able to react to it.

Not being able to be reactive to something as important as mental health could ruin someone’s career or, worse, life. How are people going to see the signs they haven’t been exposed to? By instructing people on mental health, the issue could be acknowledged, and steps taken to mitigate—possibly preventing a downward spiral.

Promotes Understanding

It is all too easy to dismiss someone as simply being incompatible or, worse, that they are incompatible with reality. This way of thinking, despite being toxic, is prevalent because it’s the easiest solution.

Learning about mental health helps break down this trend, even when interacting with nonaffected people. The reason being, learning about mental health allows an (or least attempted) sympathetic view on others. Naturally, this results in increased empathy which furthers understanding others.

Makes Teams More Efficient

Since mental health affects most things about a person, if left alone to fester, issue will spread to relationships, work, and mood of a person. Of course, all of this will impact productivity of their abilities, not only by themselves but as a team. Evidently this will negatively impact the organization’s efficiency.

What Are the Most Common Mental Health Issue’s in Professional Settings

While every mental health problem can fester in professional settings, some are more common than others and, as such, often have a greater impact.

Depression

The most common issue (mental or otherwise) in America is depression. Characterized by fatigue, aimlessness, and low morale, depression has—not discounting the human toll—consumed an estimated 27 days of work per employee every year.

Anxiety

Anxiety and depression overlap quite a bit, with the biggest difference being that anxiety carries nervousness. The similarities extend to affecting productivity, but, since anxiety carries many doubts, anxious people are likely to cancel projects midway through. Furthermore, anxiety often has physical conditions attached to it, like nauseousness, headaches, or suffocating.

ADHD, ADD, and Other Attention Disorders

While disorders like ADHD and ADD are defined by their effect on attention; however, depression and anxiety influences this also. With decreased attention typically comes decrease productivity, showing that mental health can still impact the workplace even if it does not seem as dire.

How Does One Go About Teaching These Topics?

Aside from the technical aspects, whenever starting to teach about mental health, it is important to do so with care. Mental health effects millions of people (1 in 5 Americans) every day on a personal level, so it’s easy to come off as crass and uncaring, making it imperative to treat it with the upmost respect.

Make It Personal

These mental health issues have great effects on those suffering from them which spirals into a feeling of being trapped. Avoid being clinical, if one already feels misunderstood the last thing they need is people coldly assuming what is wrong with them or how to “fix” them. Use stories and humanizing language.

Don’t Be Too Thorough

Not being too thorough plays to the point above, often instruction will be for people who aren’t medical professionals and don’t need all the specifics. The learners need the basics, namely, what is it, how do people recognize it, coping mechanisms, and how to seek help. Focusing too much on definitions or theory would make the instruction much less effective and more clinical.

Be Reassuring

People suffering from mental health problems may often have feelings of self-doubt, maybe they think they’ll lose their job or that they’ll never get to experience how others are feeling. Combating these fears by just flat-out denying them often isn’t helpful—they’ve probably heard it all before. Rather always be reassuring that everything is okay.

It’s Never Too Late to Start

You may be thinking that while it would be great to include this in employee training, your organization already has most a well thought out training routine and surely, if it was a problem, it would have showed itself already, right? Well, no, often it can take years or a lifetime for people to reveal what they are going through.

Implementing this topic into training can make a difference regardless of how experienced a person is. Furthermore, this training does not have to be disruptive, it could be a single extra course, because it doesn't have to be super in-depth. Most, if not all, of these courses can be conducted on a learning management system, like CoreAchieve, as this information can be packaged similarly.

Get started with CoreAchieve for free.