The secrecy of Mental Health Problems & dealing with the impact of life-changing events in professional circumstances.
My first hospital appointment was luckily the day after I got back from holiday during Christmas. It was the week before I started my first job, my first permanent role in an ad agency after a year of creative placements and bitty freelance work. I had a new work partner, my first in the creative world. We had got close quickly, she was cool, creative. We had similar tastes. A feminist, open minded, quick to have conversations about taboo subjects and personal problems. But how could I tell her that we were starting our first job together with a recent massive life changing event and rapidly worsening mental health problems?
It wasn’t until March that I first managed to get my first six-week round of therapy in Whitechapel. Starved for funds and staff, it felt disgusting to be difficult with them: ‘I can only do super early or super late, there’s no way I can take even 2 hours off work in the middle of the day’. We settled on a 8.30am slot, making me only an hour and a bit late to work every Wednesday. I spent a lot of those therapy sessions feeling guilty that I wasn’t working, such was the mad rat-race advertising and the creative industries can be. My mind elsewhere and not at all on the important things I should have been discussing.
So what do you tell work? Especially in your first job. From the first day. I contemplated telling the truth to HR, admitting to an ongoing police investigation and what was becoming severe PTSD. But the day my CCO got irritated I wasn’t in the office for a 9am review was the day after the head of HR had been piss-drunk at the bar with colleagues the night before, genuinely making jokes about sexual assault. So that was a no.
As my symptoms got worse over the next six months, I ended up needing further psychiatric help. What had been one therapy session a week turned into two, what had been a GP check-up had become a monthly check in with Tower Hamlet’s psychiatric centre. Having both a psychologist and a psychiatrist checking in on me made me feel like I was going off the rails, and I was in complete denial on the severity of the situation. My friends knew, my parents knew, my on-off boyfriend knew, and yet to my workplace I was still going to GP appointments that I waved off as check ins on my blood pressure and arrhythmia - both genuine ongoing problems but far from the truth of sitting in the waiting room next to other severely mentally unwell people, waiting for my name to be called next, amongst discussions of having to essentially be “sectioned”.
Advertising is a weird industry. In a lot of ways it feels like a lot of talk with very little action. We’re so ‘woke’. We have so many events, communities for women, for increasing diversity, for creating better work-life balances and mental health for an industry famously marred by overworking, competitiveness, bullying and male domination. The openness of workplaces seems very specific on the agency and the people within it. I feel lucky that after years jumping between two rather old school corporate agencies, I’ve reached a place of work that is genuinely welcoming to those with mental health issues and respectful of space and human needs.
It’s almost impossible to manage at the workplace when things are bad. Perhaps a silver lining of the Covid-19 pandemic is that the intense pressure of being in the office when feeling like absolute balls has been removed. When you’re having an off day, you can sit at home in your trackies feeling a bit less cautious and on edge that you might have some sort of breakdown and your cover blown. Equally, it’s much easier to be left alone in your own thoughts when you don’t have the energy of the office around you. The balance is tough.
When I had a full-blown panic attack in the middle of our massive open-plan office at a previous agency, I ran to the toilets and sat rocking on the seat sobbing. Women later came in, asked if I was ok. I was too scared to answer in case they recognised my voice and the rumours would spread. When I finally returned to my desk, the two men who sat opposite my partner and I, our line managers and two senior creatives, started making jokes about how much I overreact about rape jokes. And from that point, what had become an off comment became an ongoing point of antagonism: they knew exactly what to say to get a reaction out of me: that whenever we were going into big creative reviews with our sister, award-winning agency, my partner and I would be “absolutely raped”. They even added us to a WhatsApp group called ‘Rape victims’.
Yes, that agency obviously had major failings: a bullying atmosphere with some male camaraderie that pushed things over the line. But that’s not to say the micro-aggressions in other agencies can’t be enough to make anyone feel uncomfortable about mental health, assault and rape. From conversations I’ve had over the years, these sort of encounters are a lot less rare than we think. Yes, even in 2020.
There is a weird sort of hierarchy when it comes to which mental health problems people are comfortable with hearing about. Whilst society has come leaps and bounds with accepting how wide-spread and serious these issues are, there are many mental health problems that remain barely spoken about. PTSD is tough: the second it’s uttered, you know that means there must have been a ‘traumatic event’, a fact that makes many people very uncomfortable. Schizophrenia, manic depression, borderline personality disorder: as a society we are accepting that people have these illnesses and ongoing difficulties, but at the same time, we really just don’t want to know. And that’s just scratching the surface.
In industries such as creative advertising, where the competition is so intense and your work is so based on your cognitive and creative abilities, any inkling that this may be suffering feels like an immediate impact on agencies. As a creative, you are only as good as the stuff that comes out your brain. When your brain is unwell, you can’t do your job well. If you feel uncomfortable explaining why your brain is unwell, you trap yourself in a cycle that often makes your symptoms even worse. For juniors and those entering the industry, the competition is so intense that showing anything perceived as weakness can feel like the difference between employment and unemployment in the click of a finger. It’s safe to say that I didn’t last long in my first agency.
So what should change? Can it change? It’s easy to think of small changes agencies can make, but in reality this is an ongoing societal issue that permeates far beyond advertising. Yes, we must continue to fight against bullying, sexual harassment and inappropriate behaviour. Yes, we must continue to fight for more welcoming agencies, better work-life balances and a feeling of openness for employees: that they can approach the necessary people at work and not feel like they’re jeopardising their career. This is especially important for juniors and creatives on placement who are fighting hard to get hired. These sort of scenarios should bear no weight on how employable they are. Ultimately, if they feel easy at work, that’s a great starting place, and ultimately make them hopefully a happier, better employee than one feeling that they’re harbouring some deep dark secret.
I don’t have the answers, I’m not sure anyone does. I know that I have thrived and improved a hundred times over since being open about my mental health and my experiences, and joining an agency that has a genuine care for staff wellbeing and safeguards in place. As actions speak louder than words, being able to see actual change at work and things being dealt with in the right way is heartening. But I fear I’m in a minority rather than a majority, and until we address the hierarchy of taboo disorders and the competitive nature of commitment to work I doubt widespread change will occur. Ultimately, listen to your colleagues, hold an open mind and don’t judge. Your life is not work and work is not your life.