Michael Kirby, head of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, says that Canada’s lack of mental health care is embarrassing.
Kirby hopes the day will come when all Canadians understand that a mental disorder is an illness just like cancer or diabetes.
“You shouldn’t think any differently about somebody simply because their illness is above the neck rather than below the neck,” he says. “There’s huge hope of recovery for people with a mental illness. What I mean by recovery is they’re able to lead a pretty normal and productive life consistent with the limitations of their illness just as a diabetic is able to lead a pretty normal life subject to their illness, which may mean taking insulin. For the vast majority of people with a mental illness, they can recover within that definition of recovery.”
He says the only way to keep mental illness out of the shadows forever is to create a national social movement.
I’ve emphasized the last line as this is what we’re concentrating on for this website. We’re using social media to connect people who are concerned about mental health in the Canadian workplace. Look on the left side of this page and you will see bookmarks from a variety of sources and below that are people on twitter who talk about mental health. Check them out and connect to the conversations that interest you.
In the book, Management Rewired: Why feedback doesn’t work and other surprising lessons from the latest brain science, Charles Jacobs shows that logic and reason are not effective in changing behaviour. So what makes us think that providing data, information and research findings are going to change the way we view mental health in the workplace? It’s not. What Jacobs says about changing employee behaviour is also true about changing manager/leader behaviour:
The traditional role of a manager is Aristotelian, but it needs to become Socratic. Rather than tell employees what to do and create all of the negative relationship dynamics, the manager needs to ask. Rather than hand objectives to the employee, the manager should ask the employee to set them. Rather than give employees feedback on their performance, the manager should ask them how they think they’re doing. Rather than tell the employees how to fix a problem, the manager should ask them what they think they should do to fix it. This is, of course, counterintuitive, for it turns the relationship upside down. As the prime mover of the organization, the employee now calls the shots and the manager is in a supportive role.
If we can get the attention of business leaders, the first thing we should do is ask, “How are you doing? What do you need? How can we help you?”
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