In an effort to combat the stigma of mental health issues in the workplace, Kathleen Saxton, founder of Psyched Global and The Lighthouse Company, has teamed with leading advertising and marketing trade title, The Drum, to offer a series of tips for professionals on how to handle the issue at work.
Kathleen, who has worked with a number of senior marketing professionals over the years via her mental wellness consultancy, Psyched, will offer five tips through a series of videos to inform and help deal with issues in the workplace and help bring more of an understanding to the issues when they are encountered.
The weeklong series, entitled Mindfulness Matters, will run exclusively on The Drum as part of its efforts to help combat mental health stigmas at work, a topic being tackled through its Do It Day event which will take place in November.
Stephen Lepitak, editor of The Drum, commented: “I wanted Kathleen to offer her expertise to the industry as I believe anything that helps those battling with mental health issues is well worth the effort. It’s a growing problem that we as an industry need to battle openly, and talking about it can only help. Kathleen’s experience through Psyched is unique to this industry and I am grateful to her for giving us her time and insights for this upcoming series. Through this, I really hope we can help.”
The five-part series will run over a five-day period later in October ahead of Do It Day taking place on 16 November in Singapore, London and New York.
The original article can be found here.
Part 1 – How to seek treatment to help mental wellness
“There is a huge range of treatments that people can seek out when looking after your mental health,” explained Kathleen who mentioned yoga, meditation and other holistic treatments as well as how to choose a therapist or a counselor.
“It’s a little bit like choosing a coach, you need to try and find someone that you can work with,” she continued, adding that it could be done through the National Health Service, a general practitioner, but she caveated: “Be careful as often within the NHS they will suggest cognitive behavioral therapists which are incredible therapies if you have an initial which needs to be addressed,” but if it involves ‘early life’ issues then it may need private professional help instead.
Private help can be sought the help of the BACP or the UK Council for Psychotherapy she added, before advising that choosing two or three potential therapists and meeting with them first would help the person choose who they felt they could built trust with most.
See the original posting here.
Part 2: How to spot mental health issues in yourself and others
“Spotting it means to be that someone is maybe acting slightly out of character, they are quieter, more withdrawn, not sleeping, maybe they are getting more physically ill more often and they are certainly withdrawing from the day-to-day life, the office and the agency,” Kathleen explains before discussing ‘masking’ where people express and hide their true feelings in the work place.
See the original posting here.
Part 3: How to break the stigma around mental health
“Stigma and therefor shame also brings vulnerability but the truth is that when we share our vulnerabilities with others, we learn to understand that we are not alone in the anxieties that we all carry around what we are thinking and feeling, most of the time,” explained Kathleen who went on to cite the success of Alcoholics Anonymous as a successful practice.
She claimed that the creation of groups where people can talk about bereavement, anxiety, addiction and stress can help normalize the discussion, destigmatize the problem and banish the feelings that prevent people from progressing in their lives.
See the original posting here.
Part 4: the inter-connectivity of physical & mental health
“We often lead with our thinking but fundamentally what we are feeling is a greater driver,” she stated before explaining how the brain’s ‘feeling system’ operated. “It’s been with us since we were born,” Kathleen added before explaining elements of how the brain and the body were connected and how they send signals to each other.
“If we are looking after our physical self in a sense of being fit and eating well or exercising well, it’s understandable how we need to be aware of how we are exercising and taking care of our mind at the same time because the two are absolutely connected…and when we try to that is when we get into trouble as we may be thinking one thing but feeling another,” she continued.
See the original posting here.
Part 5: Everyone lives on a continuum of mental performance
According to Kathleen, everyone lives on a ‘continuum’ where we must look after our mental health in a similar way to a person’s physical health and for a person to consider how well they are doing and feeling.
“It could just be that you are a mild sufferer of anxiety or it could be someone who notices that actually you have been suffering with a deep depression for a long time but are covering it and masking it really well. It may well that you are a high functioning addict, or you are someone who is suffering with a bereavement of a parent or a child and you have been working hard to cope with it and live with it – that’s also fine, but maybe it’s time to address it. That means looking at where you are on the continuum and how you bring yourself back to a place where you feel more content, happy and more congruent in the world,” advised Kathleen.
See the original posting here.
