A reader writes:
I work at a small company where I like to maintain a professional persona, focusing on getting work done and keeping my personal life separate. The company is not well managed but I have a decent amount of autonomy, people are reasonably pleasant, and for a variety of family reasons the location, commute, and hours work really well and would be hard to replicate elsewhere.
My boss has started asking us to share reflections on mental health as an icebreaker at mandatory meetings in the name of “breaking down the stigma around mental health.” His intention is so genuinely good — he wants to support his staff. Usually I deflect by saying something relatively generic about limiting my social media use. However, this is increasing in frequency and the people who jump in first set the tone by going all-in and sharing super personal details about medications and therapy. It creates a lot of implicit pressure to share something similarly personal.
Aside from finding this uncomfortable, I’m noticing that these sharing sessions actually detract from my mental health. (I don’t have truly serious issues, but I do struggle with some anxiety and insomnia.) Work is by far the most significant stress in my life, because the organization is not well managed, roles/assignments are unclear, and some staff work glaringly harder than others with no one ever held to account for failing to produce. It’s not a toxic workplace or anything, but neither is it particularly enjoyable to see people coming late and leaving early while taking long lunches, while I’m glued to my computer.
I’ve suffered a lot from insomnia that’s offen triggered by workplace frustrations, so protect my mental health I’ve been working on creating a mental wall where I ignore what everyone else is doing or not doing except for my direct reports (mantra is “Not my circus, not my monkeys”) and focus on doing a good job on my own projects. These “mental health sharing sessions” break down this (sadly fragile) wall and I end up dwelling on negative thoughts and feelings again, often leading to insomnia that night, because when I really contemplate what I need for mental health, I re-examine all the frustrations of the office.
I want to manage my own mental fragility and not make it someone else’s problem or blame others, but I also want to protect myself from these spirals if possible. I also worry that others may be finding these sharing sessions helpful, and that by asking for them to stop I’d be standing in the way of someone else’s process.
Tl;dr: Boss wants us to share what our mental health needs and what would really support my mental health would be a better-managed workplace, but I don’t think that’s on the table and contemplating that fact is making me feel worse. Can you help me find a constructive way to address this?
This is … so inappropriate.
He might be well-meaning, but it is so not his place, or any employer’s place, to request this of people. Many, many people prefer to keep their mental health private, or at least not to share details about it with their boss and coworkers. And many, many people prefer not to receive information of that sort about their boss and coworkers, as well.
Frankly, he is asking for legal issues here as well, because by soliciting all of this mental health information from people, he might be (a) inadvertently creating accommodation obligations for the company that it doesn’t realize it will have, and/or (b) setting up the company for claims of discrimination if someone (incorrectly or not) later believes he treated them differently based on something mental-health-related they shared in these meetings, or feels that they were required to disclose a disability (even if he doesn’t feel he’s requiring anything).
But the legal issues are the least of the problems here. The far bigger one is that this is a huge invasion of privacy and wildly inappropriate.
If he wants to support his staff, he can do that by giving people reasonable hours and time off for whatever form of self-care they might need, using his influence to push for good company-provided health benefits, and otherwise supporting people’s individual mental health needs. It does not require a group therapy session at the start of every meeting.
Can you find out if any of your other coworkers feel uncomfortable with this? If they do, you and they could speak up as a group and say something like, “We’re not comfortable being asked to share such personal information at work. At a minimum, we’d like to be able to opt out, but we’d like to discontinue this practice altogether because it’s actually creating more stress for some of us. We’d like to be able to focus on the work we’re here to do.”
Or there’s a more blunt version if you prefer it: “This feels really inappropriate in a work setting, where people might have good reason not to want to discuss mental health with their boss and coworkers. We don’t want to participate in this.”
You can also say either of those on your own, but doing it as a group will create more pressure on your boss to cut this out.
You could also just go with “pass” or “I’m not into sharing this kind of thing” every time it’s your turn in a meeting, but that doesn’t address the fact that the practice in general is stressing you out, so I think you’ve got to tackle it more head-on, as in one of the examples above.
And I hear you that you’re concerned about taking away something that others might find helpful — but this is Just Not Appropriate at work, and you’ll be doing a favor to your employer (and to future employees who will come along later and be horrified the first time they’re at a meeting where this happens) by pointing out that this needs to stop. And keep in mind that if there are some people who really want to continue this, they could form their own private group to do it. It shouldn’t be part of meetings where people haven’t explicitly opted in, and opted in without pressure.
my boss wants us to all share our mental health needs – at every meeting was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.
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