Clocking in for work does not magically pause any mental health symptoms you might experience. How can you manage your mental health at work? What can your manager do to support you? At Cottonwood in Tucson, Arizona, we would like to help you find answers to these questions that work for your specific concerns.
Sharing Your Story
Mental illness is not something we should be ashamed to discuss openly. Just like medical issues, a mental health condition can happen to anyone, and you deserve the same support from your employer that you would get if you were experiencing a medical concern. On the other hand, no one is entitled to your private health information, whether it is medical or mental health.
Sharing your story openly might make it easier to access accommodations, but that doesn’t mean you cannot get accommodations without explaining your situation or that you cannot choose to quietly manage symptoms on your own, if that is more comfortable for you or if you have a boss you don’t trust to be supportive.
Addressing Challenges Without Disclosing
Even if you decide not to talk about your mental health concerns, there may be things that you can ask your boss to address without openly indicating that you have a mental health condition, such as:
- Excessive workload
- Conflicting demands or expectations
- Ambiguous responsibilities
- Unfair treatment
- Lack of transparency
- Poor communication
- Insufficient growth opportunities
While these things can take a serious toll on the mental health of a person with a behavioral health diagnosis, they are also stressors for anyone in the office, so addressing them won’t necessarily give your boss any information about your specific mental health concerns.
Coping With Emotional Distress at Work
It’s difficult to have a productive workday if you are struggling. Depending on how difficult the situation is, you may need to take some time off, or you might just need to try some grounding exercises to get yourself back on track. Grounding exercises are techniques you can use to manage emotional distress, such as anxiety or panic attacks, which can result from your fight-or-flight response being triggered. Grounding exercises are often pretty discreet, so it would not be obvious to people around you that you are having a hard time. Grounding exercises might involve taking deep breaths, observing your surroundings, or making lists to redirect your brain away from difficult feelings. There are many different ways to experience grounding, so if our previous blog on this topic didn’t provide options that work for you, you may find more suitable options by searching online.
Handling Employee Mental Health Like a Boss
If you are in a supervisory role and unsure how to best support your employees’ mental health, you can start by:
- Creating a private, uninterrupted space where employees can have discussions about sensitive topics
- Learning more about mental health and signs that someone is struggling
- Practicing non-judgmental conversations about mental health with a friend or colleague you don’t supervise, so that you’re more comfortable having similar discussions with your direct reports
- Asking open-ended questions, such as “How are you feeling?” “What can I do to help?” “Who do you have supporting you?”
- Becoming familiar with strategies you can use to help an employee navigate a mental health crisis
- Offering adjustments and accommodations
- Building an office culture that supports employees addressing their mental health in the ways that work best for them by modeling healthy behaviors, encouraging employees to use leave time to take vacations, offering mental health days as part of employee benefit packages, having flexible working hours, allowing work-from-home days, ensuring workloads are not excessive, offering affordable health insurance to employees and their families, and ensuring wages keep up with the cost of living
- Providing reminders to employees about how EAP, HR, and outside supports can assist them if they are struggling
- Destigmatizing mental health
- Following up about mental health concerns employees have previously shared with you
- Maintaining confidentiality by only sharing private mental health information with people who need to know
At Cottonwood, we know how much it can help our patients to have supportive communities around them. This includes their workplaces and direct supervisors. Many people with mental health conditions can work full-time, which means they are spending half of their waking hours during the work week at their jobs.
