Warning: this blog touches on suicide, please take care while reading.

I’ve been wanting to write this blog for ages because, before retraining as a counsellor, I had a demanding job and experienced sleepless nights, irritability, stress, and anxiety – so this is personal.

Bosses want you to be ‘well’ because it makes you more productive and present, benefitting the organisation. So many, in the public and private sector, offer activities like mindfulness, therapy, and more.

But there are two main issues with these schemes:

One: They don’t work

Despite the money spent on them (£48bn globally in 2021 according to the Guardian), research showed that few tools used had a significant impact on wellbeing or job satisfaction.

Instead, according to the mental health UK’s Burnout report, the workforce is a ‘ticking time bomb’ as 1 in 5 adults took time off for poor mental health caused by stress. Yet, half of workers thought that bosses didn’t have a plan to fix the workplace issues that caused stress – so much for wellness schemes.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) burnout is caused by chronic workplace stress that goes unmanaged.

It’s clear that stress originates in the workplace e.g. via issues such as high workloads, harassment, performance pressures, and bullying.

So why try to fix a toxic work culture by focusing on the individual?

Two: They individualise workplace causes

In 2018, a Cardiff university accounting lecturer threw himself from the library window, smashing through the glass roof below. The suicide note later found in his office, spoke of his pleas to management about unreasonably high workloads. These went unanswered and, as the pressure engulfed him, suicide was his escape.

The Cardiff ‘wellbeing fortnight’ running at the time his suicide note came to light, didn’t discuss workloads. Nor any structural changes that might have prevented this death.

While the above is an extreme example of what can happen, workplace ‘wellness’ schemes tend to individualise issues caused by the workplace – i.e. they focus on how the person experiencing the issue, should act and change.

In his book Sedated, James Davies discusses the rise of Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) in the workplace. It’s the role of Mental Health First Aiders to identity potential mental health issues at work.

He cites the worrying trend of MHFA shifting the focus from what was happening to people at work to what was wrong with them. Normal responses to structural workplace issues are reframed as signs of mental ‘illness’.

Wellness schemes like MHFA, don’t encourage empowerment or questioning of workplace environments, but shift the responsibility for problems caused by work, onto us.

What can help?

If you’re reading this and experiencing distress you believe originates at work, I want to say that it’s NOT due to some deficiency in you.

What I describe above speaks to a general societal movement seeking to de-politicise mental health and locate its cause within the self.

I see it in my own profession, with its emphasis on mental illness and diagnosis. Yet the distress we experience is often normal in the face of trauma or wider social problems. That’s why I aim to acknowledge and validate how your experience fits within a broader context.

Working with a therapist of your choosing instead of one mandated through your employer’s wellness scheme, allows you to be in control of the therapy process, as well as how you approach and talk about your experience.

When you’re told that you need to ‘cope better’ in a workplace that consistently fails to meet your needs, using therapy to express your true feelings about what’s really going on, can be both powerful and healing.

Please get in touch if you’d like space to explore your experiences at work.