Learn to squish

You’ll be as aware as I am - writes Alex Killick, of Glasgow Caledonian University - of the slow cultural shift that we find ourselves experiencing around the subject of mental health. Yesterday’s World Mental Health Day is an indicator of that shift – and it is immensely welcome that we’re moving in the direction we are, of more openness about issues that affect so many of us, of better care for ourselves and others, and fewer relationships, careers and lives damaged by problems with mental health.

But it’s difficult. The stigma is deeply embedded culturally, and we are far from laying it to rest for good. You’ll have heard the statistic that one in four of us experience mental health issues at some point in our lives. I’ve got no problem accepting that number at all, indeed I wonder if we underplay it. As HR professionals we can commit to actions large and small that will improve the situation. Some will want to take a process approach, ensuring institution-wide policies are in place; while others might concentrate on individual support, building personal resilience, thinking at a personal level about wellbeing.

So what follows isn’t “the answer”, it’s simply a sharing of our current response at Glasgow Caledonian, and perhaps a starting point for a conversation in your teams about practical steps you can take.

I’ll start with the personal. I remember a presentation given by Rachel Weiss of the Rowan Consultancy in which she spoke of the pressure we often put on ourselves to be perfect, and she represented that as a porcelain goose, very beautiful, but actually rather fragile. In contrast sits a squishy toy, less perfect perhaps, but full of bounce-back-ability – the very resilience we increasingly recognise as a core human/business skill. The goose tends to assume the worst, spiralling into a deficit mindset where nothing is as it should be in the search for perfection, and shatters under the pressure. The squishy toy squishes, adapts, carries on. Others could provide similar metaphors – I remember previous UHR guest blogger Rob Baker talking about resilience as the ability to sail on the stormy ocean like a bouy – anchored for sure, but flexible in our ability to deal with, and bounce back from, challenge.

The perfect goose is perhaps the good-enough goose.

I remember February’s Time to Talk Day. Anecdotally I believe it was very positive, with members of staff and students from around my university sharing their stories and ideas. I came away wanting to harness that positivity – within the People Services team we talked about ways of supporting our own wellbeing, and this led to a summer development day which in turn became a step on the path to a Mental Health at Work Taskforce, working in tandem with student-led activity. I hope it is a very clear signal that we are listening and want as an institution to have a broad conversation about mental health. I believe we are now in gear, and that the steps we’ve taken in recent times will allow us to develop a clear Mental Health Action Plan. This may in time sit within the wider GCU People Strategy or live alone as a GCU Mental Health Plan. It will need to co-exist happily with outputs and recommendations from other governance routes, and student activity.

We’d perhaps argue that we are already doing a good job in meeting many of the “mental health core standards”. So for instance we’ve retained the Healthy Working Lives Gold standard in successive years. We’ve implemented the Business in the Community “Workwell” model. Our People Strategy commits us to creating a working environment where people can thrive. We implement on-demand resilience training for staff, backed up by courses on mindfulness, and managing stress workshops.

You may be ahead of us, you may be behind. I’d be happy to talk to you about your thinking.

I asked the twelve members of that Taskforce – thinking about the issue of mental health from a wide range of points of view including the academic – to talk about their own experiences. My aunt was bipolar, while my half-brother died prematurely from drug and alcohol addiction. Most had similar stories. If, as individuals, and HR teams, and HE institutions – and indeed as a whole society – we are at the tipping point where we simply know we have to do better, that in itself is a huge step forward.

There’s more to this than taking better care of ourselves and of others. But it’s a pretty good place to start. The perfect goose shatters under the stress of the attempt. Learn to be good enough. Learn to squish.