Mental health is something that everyone has. It’s a normal part of a person’s wellbeing make-up. The state of that health varies from person to person, and from time to time, and as someone who is very open about mental ill health I was very pleased to be recently offered the opportunity to go on a mental health first aid course on behalf of Fourth Floor.

Every company has first-aiders in it. It just makes sense that someone in an office is responsible for any injury or ill health, and is trained to give people the help and immediate support they need before they can get to a doctor or a hospital. So by that logic every office should also have mental health first aid facilities too. Someone who has been trained to deal with a multitude of issues, and respond in a way that will help colleagues get the right help.

The statistics about employees who feel comfortable talking to their work about mental ill health are not very positive. My goal in Fourth Floor is to open that door and make sure that all members of staff feel like they can talk if they want to, in a safe and confidential manner. In general I think that the structure of our business - having smaller squads with line managers in each - may help to make our colleagues feel more comfortable to do so, but making mental health first-aid an official, overarching part of Fourth Floor’s make-up feels an important next step. 

With 2020 being such a challenging year, quite a few people in my close circles have struggled with mental ill health for the first time due to their new circumstances, whether resulting from being put on furlough, having to work from home on a much more permanent basis than they are used to, or any of the myriad other ways 2020 has impacted so many people. 

For some, being around others can help to keep them motivated and happy, where others might feel the opposite. In a few cases I have found that people have been opening up more than usual about struggling during this pandemic. Perhaps it is the sense of unity in that we are all going through something strange together. While no-one wants the cause of the phenomenon to persist, I hope that the trend can continue. The uptick in mental ill health is a clear and troubling side-effect of Covid-19 that shouldn’t be underplayed, but if there’s a silver lining, it’s the mass normalisation of mental health conversation. Simply saying you’re having a tough time can be a weight off of the chest.

As such, the mental health first aid course I took focuses on the language we use to talk to people with mental ill health, as well as key skills like active listening. Throughout multiple online activities, we explored examples of things that someone with mental ill health could be going through, and how they may talk about it out loud. Through this, we would identify which techniques we could put in place to assist in particular situations. One particularly difficult but valuable task had one of us talk to a small group about something that was bothering them, so that the whole team could respectfully assist and apply active listening skills. This covered many different kinds of ill health, ranging from depression and bipolar disorders, through to eating disorders and - equally importantly - the ways to look for the unspoken signs of each.

Though we got to know the signs of many kinds of ill health, we were never taught to diagnose people with them (and nor should anyone who is not a trained professional). The important learning was in discovering how to spot the subtle signs that someone might not be doing well. Most people spend a large amount of time around their colleagues, making it entirely possible to pick up on telltale personal behavioural changes with the right insight and guidance. Learning to spot something as simple as withdrawing from social situations, or generally looking a bit more unkempt could mean that a person is struggling. 

And it’s certainly not just about being reactive. From this course I have already been able to put together a pool of the right resources for the people who have asked for a helping hand, and also prepare advice for other line managers on how they might help to recognise the signs that someone might need to talk about something beyond work in their regular 1-2-1 sessions. Learnings from the course are already allowing us to reinforce our wellbeing infrastructure and suite of readily available help and resources. 

Indeed, in terms of establishing new ways to look at and monitor mental health, a huge takeaway from my training is the understanding of our ‘stress containers’. Stress is something that affects everyone, and this way of looking at it allows us to visualise how we all cope on a tailored, individual basis. One individual’s stress container will not be the same as someone else's. For example I joke that my stress container is the size of a pint glass. I can easily get overwhelmed if I don’t manage stress accordingly. Someone with a high-stress job like a CEO may have a stress container the size of a skip! This doesn’t mean they don’t get stressed, but it does mean that it takes more for them to get to that tipping point. 

If we find that too much stress is filling our ‘container’ at once without suitable methods of decompressing, the container will overflow and cause burnout. Some things that may help us to maintain balance might include watching a movie with a friend, talking to family members, or getting some exercise. This allows some of that stress that has built up to flow out again. 

Every person is different, and knowing this and looking out for the personal signs of stress on your team is very important. This is especially true now that most of us are working in our own homes, somewhat isolated, and perhaps self-managing a little more. Making sure your team isn’t overwhelmed with a high workload can really help keep up motivation and team morale. And an important part of that - especially when working remotely - comes from ensuring that you really know how to spot when something might be wrong, whether you’re being explicitly told or not. 

I try to stay on the look-out for signs that people are struggling as a matter of course, which may be a result of having gone through my own fair share of issues in the past. As such, it comes more easily to me to open up about - and constructively discuss - mental health. But for a lot of less experienced line managers, however well-intentioned, that might not be the case. 

To those people, I would strongly recommend the Mental Health First Aid England course. It will help you to get some real, workable insight into the vast array of mental health issues that are out there, as well as the specific problems that those who suffer from them might go through. It might even identify some in your own immediate vicinity, that have been hiding in plain sight. Really, it’s all just about learning how to be better at looking out for each other, and better at looking after each other. At a time like this, that’s as important to the running of a good company as anything else.