Could therapy be the answer to workplace mental health issues?

Something to consider

via Psychology Today

Late last week I was ruminating about how my health has changed since retirement and despite on/off lockdowns.

I’m more active as I’m not tied to a desk and spend a lot more time in the kitchen than I used to. Moving house with all the organisation and humping ‘stuff’ around added to the degree to which I am active. The local supermarket is a bit further away than where we last lived and on an uphill return hike. Having recently acquired an Apple Watch I’m more aware of the need to remain physically active. Net-net, I managed to drop some weight in the last 11 months and am almost at what I consider my ‘fighting weight.’ Also, my cigarette consumption has dropped 40-50%. All good right? Not quite

As I was musing this with a couple of colleagues I realised the extent to which I was making terrible choices regarding my mental health in the year or two prior to retirement. I’m not sure it’s that much better today.

At one point I ‘earned’ the dubious reputation as The Man Who Never Sleeps. That wasn’t quite true but I often complained that my sleep patterns were all over the map and that if I got six hours sleep then that was a good night’s sleep.

I rationalised this state of affairs on the basis that older people need less sleep and that the startup environment demanded 24x7x365 attention. A double winner. Right? Wrong!

The truth was that I was in a constant state of tiredness. One coping mechanism was to give up most travel as I knew that amp’d the problem.

I’ve learned since that I wasn’t just over tired but stressed to the point of burnout.

The irony is that at a surface level, I kind of knew all this but couldn’t bust out of what was really a hamster wheel existence.

So it was with some interest that a colleague pointed me to Spill.chat. It’s mission is up front and central:

Spill provides therapy sessions, manager mental health training, and regular feelings check-ins — embedded into your company's Slack.

Therapy? That’s not something you hear in the endless river of stories about corporate efforts to support employees.

Spill says it focuses on firms in the London area with an emphasis on startups where cultures can be toxic. They do however count firms that are well established.

The question comes - does it make sense to offer this type of service? My view is a firm (sic) yes. My degree majored in abnormal psychology with sociology as a minor. Many years ago I undertook some training in psychotherapy and underwent about a year of therapy. It’s a part of what you have to do when training but it was also extremely helpful at the time.

One of the challenges I see for managers is the exhortation to empathise with employees they supervise. That’s a prime requirement for therapists but is that the case for managers? More to the point, if empathy has been under appreciated as a skills requirement in the past, what’s the incentive for behavioural change today and would such change be trusted?

That’s where external, corporate supported therapy can help. The key is that the therapist has no vested interest in the client as an employee but rather is invested in their whole mental health.

I don’t know whether Spill can be successful - scaling such services is hard, but looking back on my pre-retirement experience, it’s something from which I’m sure I (and by extension my team) would have benefitted.

Sleep is still an issue for me (hence my hesitancy at much mental improvement) but at least the self inflicted stress I was under has reduced considerably. I’m not sure stress ever goes away completely, and especially at times of life changing events - like the adjustment to a new position or, as in my case, retirement. But at least I know that there is real help and not just the faux words of an HR declaration of intent.

What do you think? Does this approach represent the sort of step change needed as part of a real transformational change which produces a triple bottom line win?