Insights, articles and updates on workplace mental health
The summer effect is real Most people feel better in summer. Energy tends to be higher, mood tends to be lighter, and the experience of work, while unchanged in most of its fundamentals, tends to feel more manageable. The reverse pattern in winter is equally well-documented. Lower energy, increased difficulty concentrating, a heavier quality to […]
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, […]
The seasonal pattern is real GP consultations for depression and anxiety follow a seasonal curve. Referrals to psychological services tend to peak in autumn and winter. Mood disorders with a clear seasonal component, classified as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD, affect around one in fifteen people in the UK, with many more experiencing milder but […]
Mental health awareness weeks are not interventions. Neither is a yoga app subscription. So what actually works? The visibility problem Workplace mental health has never had a higher profile. Organisations run awareness campaigns. They offer employee assistance programmes. They train mental health first aiders. They share content on social media in October. And yet the […]
When the ground shifts, the organisations that hold people together are the ones that thought about it before the crisis hit. Crises do not arrive with warning A global pandemic. A sudden restructure. A major cyber incident. A leader falling. Sustained economic pressure that grinds on for months with no clear end. Crises come in […]
Here’s something that should keep every health minister, chief constable, and NHS trust board awake at night: the people we rely on most in our darkest moments are themselves in crisis. Report after report tells us the same story. Paramedics experiencing PTSD at rates comparable to combat veterans. Doctors leaving the profession in numbers we’ve […]
You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. At some point in the last few years, nearly every organisation has said some version of it: “We want people to bring their whole selves to work.” It sounds good. It sounds progressive. It sounds like the kind of thing that belongs on a careers page next to photos […]
If you scroll through social media for more than five minutes, you’ll come across a post telling you that men don’t talk about their feelings. That men bottle things up. That they suffer in silence. And there’s truth in that narrative. The statistics are well-documented: men account for around three quarters of all suicides in […]
Peter Kelly, who authored the new RCVS guide on suicide prevention with Sarah Ambrose, on the four patterns every leader should take from it.
Someone asked me recently whether music could play a role in workplace mental health. My first reaction was that it’s an interesting idea. My second was that it’s actually more interesting than I initially gave it credit for. We all know, instinctively, that music does something to us. It shifts our mood. It helps us […]
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