About Workplace Mental Health
The bite-sized world
We communicate in fragments. Push notifications, social media posts, chat messages, quick-hit video content. The platforms that carry most of our daily communication have built brevity into their architecture. A standard SMS is 160 characters. A tweet grew from 140 to 280 but the appetite for short content did not change. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, all built on the premise that attention is scarce and must be captured fast.
This has consequences for every domain that depends on nuanced communication. In workplace mental health, where the gap between a message that helps and a message that misleads can be significant, those consequences deserve serious attention.
What gets lost in compression
Mental health, as a concept, resists compression. The distance between ‘I am feeling low this week’ and ‘I am experiencing a major depressive episode’ is clinically significant. The difference between work-related stress that a management intervention might address and a clinical anxiety disorder that requires psychological treatment is meaningful.
When information about mental health is reduced to slogans, it tends to flatten these distinctions. ‘It’s okay not to be okay’ is a kind sentiment. It is not a pathway to support. ‘Talking helps’ is broadly true. It does not tell anyone who to talk to, what to say, or what happens next.
A suicide prevention message that fits in a tweet is not a suicide prevention message. It is a tweet.
The risk of false reassurance
Short-form mental health messaging often performs reassurance. It signals that the organisation is thinking about mental health. It creates a visible artefact of concern. And it can generate a false sense that something has been communicated, understood, and acted on, when in fact very little has landed with depth.
For someone in genuine distress, encountering a well-designed graphic about talking to a colleague is unlikely to move them to action. The barriers to seeking support, stigma, uncertainty about what will happen, concern about professional consequences, are not dissolved by a well-intentioned post. They require time, trust, and direct human contact.
The specific risks around crisis content
The risks of compression are most acute when the content relates to crisis: suicidal ideation, self-harm, severe mental health episodes. Safe messaging guidelines around suicide, developed by organisations including the Samaritans and underpinning standards such as BS 30480, the British Standard for workplace suicide prevention, exist for reasons grounded in evidence.
Oversimplified content about suicide, however well-intentioned, can misrepresent the nature of suicidal thinking, romanticise or sensationalise the subject, or provide information without the context needed to use it safely. These are not hypothetical concerns. They are documented risks that responsible communicators take seriously.
The employer responsibility problem
Under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 and the developing framework established by ISO 45003, the international standard for psychological health and safety at work, employers have a duty of care that extends to psychological health. How that duty is discharged matters.
Employees in distress need to know specifically what support is available, how to access it without bureaucratic barriers, what happens when they do, and whether the person they approach will handle the conversation well. None of that can be communicated in 160 characters.
A test worth applying
Read your organisation’s mental health communications back as if you are an employee in real difficulty. Not difficulty in the abstract. Specific difficulty: you have not slept properly in weeks, you are not managing, and you are afraid of what your manager will think if you say something. Does what you have produced help that person take a step? Or does it tell them that everything is okay and the organisation cares, without giving them any meaningful way forward?
That is the test that 160 characters cannot pass on its own.
About Peter Kelly and Being Real
Peter J Kelly is an occupational psychologist with more than 20 years at the Health and Safety Executive shaping national policy on workplace mental health. He was a member of the ISO 45003 drafting panel, the world’s first international standard for psychological health and safety at work. Being Real is his specialist consultancy, helping organisations move from policy to practice.
If you would like to talk about what real support looks like in your organisation, contact Peter at being-real.co.uk