Caroline O'Donoghue: Were we all mentally unwell, or was our job making us sick?
A few years ago, I worked at a place that considered itself to be extremely liberal. I don’t know, now, if a business can be ‘liberal’.
Considering the aim of all businesses is, by definition, to make as much profit for as little overhead as possible, you wonder if that doesn’t sort of make all businesses the same, regardless of what they put in the newsletter. Anyway. One day, at this extremely liberal workplace, a co- worker had a panic attack during an office-wide meeting. She was in the middle of reading something out loud, stopped, and started to have trouble breathing. She said: “I’m sorry, I think I’m having an anxiety attack.” The person leading the meeting was extremely empathetic.
Without drawing too much attention to the issue, she told our suffering co-worker to get air, to take as much time as she needed, and asked if she would like anyone else to go with her. The co-worker said no, she would go alone, and excused herself. We carried on the meeting. The rest of the day carried on as normal.
I remember, at the time, feeling very proud of us all. No one rolled their eyes, or gossiped, or speculated on what might be causing our co-worker’s distress. We knew our co-worker had a history of anxiety and depression. She had been open about it when she started. This was right in the thick of the 'We Need to Talk about Mental Health' phase.
The papers were full of it. There were lots of pieces on the stigma of mental illness, lots of statistics about young men and suicide, lots of interviews with Ruby Wax. We were all beginning to understand that mental illness was simply about brain chemistry, a genetic glitch, a random biological happenstance. I related it a lot to my two siblings, who have diabetes: it was just a condition they lived with, and with the right care, it rarely caused them any hassle. Therapy and medication to the mentally unwell were the same as insulin to my brother and sister.
I still believe all of this. And I think that, in the last 10 years, there have been enormous gains in terms of the general public understanding of mental illness. But here’s something else I want to throw into the mix: by the end of three years, almost everyone in that liberal office had a formal diagnosis of anxiety or depression.
I know that because everyone talked about it. ‘We Need To Talk About Mental Health’ etc. But what we didn’t talk about, not really, was how our workplace had created an environment where both anxiety and depression could thrive. We were all expected to bring our work home with us. We were all expected to care deeply, not just on a professional but on a personal level, about everything the company did. We were always given false targets — after X date, things will get easier — but they never did. Promotions and pay rises were vanishingly rare.
We had no place to eat lunch, and so everyone ate at their desks. There was a large screen in our office that compared everyone’s targets and encouraged us to compete with each other. The office was in a basement, and there was no natural daylight. We were constantly rewarded with cake and pizza, rather than money or time off, and we all gained a stone working there. We all reassured one another that we were beautiful at any size, and we meant it, but the simple fact is that no one wants to go up a dress size in two months.
And as each person entered therapy or started medication, there was a slow, silent epiphany, like the moment in a horror film when you realise that the call is coming from inside the house. Were we all mentally unwell, or was our job making us sick?
To reiterate, I still think that a lot of mental illness is genetic, or a brain glitch, or a hangover from trauma. But I think we sometimes ignore the importance of situational mental illness. That bad places can make people who were previously fine feel extremely sick.
And it makes me wonder if, by framing mental illness as being a ‘me’ problem — my brain, my glitch, my problem — we shift the blame away from bad workplaces and unhealthy dynamics. I am constantly hearing about offices which bolt on ‘wellness’ solutions to their company culture — meditation spaces at work, free yoga classes, team away days — but which still refuse their staff things that will actually improve their mental health.
Like four-day weeks, or flexible hours, or provisions for childcare. I often meet new mothers who dismiss their crying jags as ‘baby blues’, when it seems obvious to me that they are in untenable situations at work. And every time, no matter who I’m talking to, the blame or diagnosis for their problems comes back to themselves: my brain, my bad coping skills, my childhood trauma. Is it your childhood trauma, I think, or is your boss just a dickhead?
As any therapist will tell you, you can’t change people, but you can change how you respond to them. And they’re right. It’s no use trying to change a parent or a partner. But you can change systems. I can’t think of a better time than now to start.
