Time to talk about mental health

Photo credit: Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash

It was Mental Health Week a couple of weeks ago, but I was too busy to write this article. Actually, that’s not true. I was too nervous to write this article. But those are both good reasons to write it, even belatedly.

I want to write about how anyone can experience challenges with their mental health at work, how it can be difficult to know when this is happening, and how welcome it is that times have changed. I also want to illustrate this with an example of a personal experience.

Two declarations before I share that experience. First, I am not a health professional and have no training in the field. Second, this is a tale of everyday stress and its consequences. I have come to realise that, part of the reason that it is important to talk about mental health is that many people experience challenges which are not long term, and which don’t require a diagnosis, but that nevertheless need help. And they (including me) don’t always feel comfortable asking for help.

My example comes from a time, many years ago, when I was running a software delivery project. It was a particularly difficult project. I took it over when it was already running behind schedule and over budget. It depended on many different teams in different countries and different parts of the organisation, all of whom had better things to do than help my project.

So far, so routine. Another failing project. I opened my metaphorical toolbox and got on with the work of figuring out where the team needed help, meeting stakeholders, adjusting the plans, finding and declaring the bad news, and attempting to unblock progress.

And I hit brick walls everywhere. No-one wanted to help. No-one wanted to hear about the bad news, or accept that it was impossible to deliver the project on time. No-one wanted to do their part of the work, but everyone wanted the outcome. I escalated to my boss, but they were unwilling to invite conflict, or have difficult conversations with their own leadership team.

So far, not so routine, but also not unheard of. I had dealt with similarly difficult challenges before. But there was something different about this situation. The combination of high expectations and missing support really got to me - got to me so much that it became a problem.

I’ve always had the sort of brain that operates at least partly in batch mode. Sometimes, solutions to complex problems come to me in the moment. But more often, my brain needs time to think about things, without me even being aware of it. I sometimes wake up in the early hours of the morning with some useful ideas and the urge to write them down.

The problem was that, in this situation, I was very aware of my brain thinking about things. There were times when this was deliberate: I would stand in front of a whiteboard or a project plan, desperately trying to figure my way out of this situation. But there were times when it was not my choice: thoughts about how dire the project was, how unreasonable everyone was being, how this conversation had gone, how that meeting had ended, intruded on my mind even when I wasn’t working. There seemed no corner of my life where I could escape these thoughts.

And they wouldn’t go away. They started intruding when I was trying to sleep. I wasn’t just waking up early in the morning with some creative solutions, I was spending the night with my mind whirling and wheeling. It got to the point where I dreaded going to bed and turning out the light, because I knew it would be another night of exhausting rumination. This wasn’t just normal project stress. This was a situation where I should have been asking for a different sort of help.

What did I do? I got out. I found another job as quickly as possible, and stepped away from the situation. And I was lucky enough that, although my confidence and my faith in others was shaken, stepping away was enough. I learnt to enjoy my new job and, after a while, found that I could still deal with challenging situations and could rely on my team and other teams. It was still possible to get things done.

More important, though, and a source of regret, is what I didn’t do. I didn’t ask for help with my mental state. I didn’t share my inner experiences with anybody, even those closest to me. I expressed my practical challenges (I can’t get these resources; this dependency is broken; these milestones can’t be met) but not my mental challenges (I can’t sleep; my mind is full of useless thoughts). I don’t really understand why. Perhaps it was because this was a long time ago, and it was less acceptable to talk about such things.

We are in 2023 now, and it is supposedly more acceptable to talk about mental health. We even have a week for it (a whole month if you are in the USA). Except that it took me three weeks to write this article, and I almost didn’t. (Much easier to write about technology.) I don’t wish to equate my experience with the experience of anyone who has suffered much more long-lasting and devastating mental health issues. But I do wish to show that mental health issues can affect anybody: I hope that this is useful to somebody, and that it’s a tiny step (a big step for me) in talking about something that many (including me) still find difficult to talk about.