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 * 05-02-22
 * mental health at work


MENTAL HEALTH AT WORK: IT’S (FINALLY) TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT


FAST COMPANY BROUGHT TOGETHER A ROUNDTABLE OF BUSINESS LEADERS AND ADVOCATES TO
DISCUSS WHY THE MENTAL WELL-BEING OF EMPLOYEES SHOULD BE A TOP PRIORITY.

[Photo: KangHee Kim]
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

More Like This
Leveling the 3D playing field
Revolutionizing cancer testing
Here’s the real reason why all of the crypto logos look alike
By Fast Company Stafflong Read

This story is part of State of Mind, a special package covering mental health at
work. Fast Company also has an excerpt of Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn’s new
memoir, Burn Rate, about growing his company while having bipolar disorder, and
looks at how Alicia Keys is expanding her business interests mindfully.




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

High-profile athletes and entertainers have increasingly been speaking out about
their struggles with mental well-being in recent years. Very few business
leaders have done the same. There’s a simple reason for that: There’s still a
stigma associated with revealing such seeming vulnerability at work. But with
burnout, anxiety, and depression among workers hitting record levels—according
to a 2021 report from mental health consultancy Mind Share Partners,
three-quarters of full-time U.S. workers reported experiencing at least one
symptom of a mental health condition in the past year, up from 59% in 2019—we’re
seeing signs of change. Companies are making mental health benefits more
accessible and starting to have substantive discussions about how company
culture affects employees’ sense of well-being. Lawmakers are wrestling with how
to ensure that mental health and physical health are treated equally by
employers and insurers. And business leaders are beginning to speak more openly
about their own experiences.



Jane Pauley, journalist and CBS Sunday Morning anchor, is the author of Your
Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life and Skywriting: A Life Out of
the Blue [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Source image: Matthew Eisman/Getty
Images]To talk about these issues, Fast Company brought together CBS Sunday
Morning anchor Jane Pauley, who has been open about having bipolar disorder;
entrepreneurs Andy Dunn and Paul English, who have shared their own struggles
with mental illness; and mental health and well-being advocates Alicia Keys and
Amit Paley, CEO of the Trevor Project.



Jane Pauley: Two years of working from home—either in isolation or with toddlers
or teenagers underfoot—has been very difficult. The sense of anxiety and grief
has been unrelenting. It seems as if everyone is willing to talk about mental
health more openly.





Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, winner of 15 Grammys, wrote the memoir More
Myself: A Journey, and founded Keys Soulcare, a clean skincare and wellness
brand. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg, Source images: 52nd NAACP Image
Awards/BET/Getty Images, James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images]Alicia Keys: So
many of us are going through [mental wellness issues] because the world we’re
living in is unrelenting. At some point, we have to figure out how we are
relating to ourselves within that.



Pauley: Two days ago, my colleague asked me, “How are you?” I told them that
I’ve not been doing that great. I’m like the millions of Americans who have kind
of slogged through the last two years. There has been depression and there has
been some anxiety. And yet [until then] I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody at
work. It felt empowering. It felt liberating.



Amit Paley is the CEO and executive director of the Trevor Project, one of the
nation’s leading suicide prevention organizations, which serves LGBTQ youth.
[Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Source image: Gary Gershoff/WireImage/Getty
Images]Amit Paley: It is so important that people know that it is okay not to be
okay. When we’re not feeling that way, it’s important to talk about it and share
that with other people.





Paul English: Secrecy and shame are the enemy of healing. I was diagnosed as
being bipolar at age 25. Initially, I started talking to a few people, like one
sibling, one friend, one person at work. I wanted someone from each of those
three elements of my life to know what’s going on so they could keep an eye on
me and help me when I was going off the deep end, on the depressive side, or
flip side, on the manic end. I had those people watching out for me. Over time,
over the years, I started to become open to more people.



Paul English has cofounded several successful tech companies, including Kayak
and GetHuman, and is CEO of Boston Venture Studio; he also helped create the
peer to-peer group Bipolar Boston. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Boston
Globe/Getty Images]Andy Dunn: In the year 2000, I was spiraling. It was the turn
of the millennium. I remember seeing a video of people praying on TV for the
arrival of the Messiah. And I came to the conclusion—through a mixture of
drinking and my unraveling mental state—that [the Messiah] was me. I ended up
[having a manic episode and] spending a week in a hospital and going on
medication. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 1. I couldn’t process it.
I felt so much humiliation and shame over the manic episode that to acknowledge
what had happened would be to acknowledge the diagnosis. I decided, “You know
what? It’s not true. It can’t be true.” I just decided everything was normal.



I was symptom-free for eight years. Then in the formative years of building
Bonobos, I experienced catatonic depression and a cofounder breakup, and we were
always six weeks or six months away from running out of money. I began
medicating my good moods with alcohol and treating my depressive moods with
silence and secrecy. Then 16 years after the diagnosis, I had a second
catastrophic psychotic episode in New York. That was when the journey [to
managing the disorder] began.





Entrepreneur and investor Andy Dunn cofounded Bonobos, served as its CEO, and
oversaw its acquisition by Walmart in 2017. He is the author of the new memoir
Burn Rate. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg]Pauley: Paul, why do you think you
had a different attitude toward disclosure? You were up front about your
experience with bipolar, even at the beginning of your career.



English: One thing I learned as a young executive at a software company is that
often you take somebody early in their career, they get promoted, and then
[they] get hit with imposter syndrome and feel incompetent. The secret I’ve
learned about imposter syndrome is [that] if you’re vulnerable to your team and
you acknowledge the things you’re not good at, you’re not hiding anything
anymore.

> We don’t invest in the whole being. We invest in the physical. But we don’t
> invest in the mental.”

Alicia Keys, singer and entrepreneur

Keys: I think we all deal with this idea that we’re supposed to be perfect in
some way. The same thing happened to me when I was 20. You don’t even know who
you are at 20. You’re a little bit of what your mama told you. You’re a little
bit of what the world told you. And then you’re supposed to go off into the
world.



[Early in my career] people watched [me] intently. I’m a New Yorker. I didn’t
want people to violate me. I immediately put up a wall, but I put up the worst
kind of wall: the one that you pretend is not there. You think you’re protecting
yourself but you’re actually hurting yourself. All I knew to do was just to fake
it till you make it. Once I stopped doing that—which I have to remind myself to
do every day—I started to feel much more honest, because I didn’t have to
pretend.

Pauley: When I disclosed to my colleague the other day that I wasn’t feeling
that great, I also said to her, there’s really nothing I expect work to do for
me. I don’t know if I should have expected more. What responsibilities does a
workplace have? Who in the workplace is responsible for an individual’s health?

Paley: There’s a traditional view of the workplace: People put their lives to
the side, come to work, and then they would go back to their life. We’re
evolving toward a model where people can bring part of their lives into the
workplace, because you don’t stop being a human being [when you go to work].



English: I think the main responsibility we have as business leaders, when it
comes to mental health—and really all health issues—is to let your team know
that you have their back, and you’ll be there for them when they’re struggling.
I’ve found that it’s been helpful to my team when they hear me be vulnerable. At
appropriate times, I’ll be open in smaller groups. I think that gives other
people the permission to be open.

When you look at business leaders, people follow confidence, but they are loyal
to vulnerability. For me, it’s about creating a community where people are
helping each other, starting from the leadership team. Managers need to
demonstrate that they care about people’s well-being, even extending to the
health of their [employees’] families. It’s going to end up hurting your
business if [an employee] can’t function because they’re having an issue at home
that they can’t deal with.

> I hope the business community can speak with one voice to say, ‘Everyone
> deserves care. Everyone should get mental health care support when they need
> it.’”

Amit Paley, the Trevor Project

Paley: We also want to make sure that we are supporting young people who are
going through different challenges, especially in this period with COVID and the
national and global reckoning on racial injustice and racial violence. For LGBTQ
young people, there are now constant attacks [on them] in states across the
country. It’s important [to] recognize that that pressure impacts different
types of people disproportionately. In mental health and in social science, it’s
what’s known as the minority stress model. People who might be LGBTQ or people
of color face discrimination and pressure to conform in certain ways. We want
[employees] who bring different perspectives [to work]. Leaders need to provide
them [with] the different support that they need, and know that’s impacting
their mental health.



It’s important to create an environment where your employees can be safe and
supported. That includes [creating] a culture where people can feel like they
can bring their full selves to work and talk about what they’re going through.
That also means that you are taking visible steps to stand up for the people on
your team and speaking out when there are injustices happening in the world that
disproportionately impact them.

Keys: I would jump on the heels of what Amit said about culture, about setting
the table for openness. If you have a weekly meeting, or a weekly or monthly
video call—much of my company works remotely—or a big board meeting, whatever
the case is, you can set the stage and say, “It’s important to me that we are
not only doing well in our business, but we’re well in our lives and that our
families are well.”

Dunn: I was starting a new company, and I remember disclosing to everyone that I
was writing [my new memoir, Burn Rate] and what it was about. My heart was going
200 beats a minute, assuming that everyone was going to be ready to quit
afterward. I got off the call and chatted with someone. I said, “That was
terrible.” And they said, “No. That was incredible.” And that changed the
company’s culture.



> When you look at business leaders, people follow confidence, but they are
> loyal to vulnerability.”

Paul English, entrepreneur

English: I’ve started five software companies at this point, and because my
teams have taken care of employees, they tend to follow me and my team, company
to company. When you’re recruiting a new person and they see someone who’s been
with you for 10 to 20 years, or even longer, they think there must be something
good happening here. This must be a company that takes care of people.

Pauley: When I wrote [my 2001 memoir, Skywriting], someone asked me why I would
come forward about mental health. I said, innocently, “Because I could afford
to.” I didn’t mean financially. Nobody was talking about the privilege then.

Dunn: You’re right, Jane. We’re at a moment when, if we have the privilege of
having had success, if we have the privilege of having had the financial
resources to get the treatment that we need, we can be more open about our
mental health.



Paley: The entire infrastructure of mental health care in this country is
fundamentally broken. We do not have enough mental health care providers. Of the
ones that we do have, many of them are not available to populations who need
them most: They’re not available in rural areas, they are not competent or
trained in how to interact with people of color or how to interact with LGBTQ
people.

Dunn: Just on the way here, I got a text message from my psychiatrist, who I try
to see twice a week. And he said, “How much was your reimbursement?” And I said,
“It’s about 5%.” And I thought [about] all the people out there who aren’t going
to pay the 95% out of pocket, because they can’t afford it. We have medical
insurance. We have vision and dental. But what about mental health insurance? I
think we really need to be led by Fortune 500 companies here. They have to make
the investment to enable people to get the care that they need.

Keys: That’s a powerful thing you just said, Andy. The fact that mental wellness
is a privilege is horrible. The fact that that’s how we deal with it, and it’s
like, “If you could pay for it, you can have it,” is horrendous. We don’t invest
in the whole being. We invest in the physical. But we don’t invest in the
mental.



Paley: It’s important that we think about the whole system. A lot of businesses
and business leaders are being thrust into the position of providing mental
health care for their employees, which is something they should do. But business
leaders and companies can also call on the government to fix this broken system.
I hope we can speak with one voice—the business community and every community—to
say, “Everyone deserves care. Everyone should get mental health care support
when they need it.”

This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.





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 * 05-02-22
 * mental health at work


MENTAL HEALTH AT WORK: IT’S (FINALLY) TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT


FAST COMPANY BROUGHT TOGETHER A ROUNDTABLE OF BUSINESS LEADERS AND ADVOCATES TO
DISCUSS WHY THE MENTAL WELL-BEING OF EMPLOYEES SHOULD BE A TOP PRIORITY.

[Photo: KangHee Kim]
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

By Fast Company Stafflong Read

This story is part of State of Mind, a special package covering mental health at
work. Fast Company also has an excerpt of Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn’s new
memoir, Burn Rate, about growing his company while having bipolar disorder, and
looks at how Alicia Keys is expanding her business interests mindfully.

advertisement

advertisement



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

High-profile athletes and entertainers have increasingly been speaking out about
their struggles with mental well-being in recent years. Very few business
leaders have done the same. There’s a simple reason for that: There’s still a
stigma associated with revealing such seeming vulnerability at work. But with
burnout, anxiety, and depression among workers hitting record levels—according
to a 2021 report from mental health consultancy Mind Share Partners,
three-quarters of full-time U.S. workers reported experiencing at least one
symptom of a mental health condition in the past year, up from 59% in 2019—we’re
seeing signs of change. Companies are making mental health benefits more
accessible and starting to have substantive discussions about how company
culture affects employees’ sense of well-being. Lawmakers are wrestling with how
to ensure that mental health and physical health are treated equally by
employers and insurers. And business leaders are beginning to speak more openly
about their own experiences.



Jane Pauley, journalist and CBS Sunday Morning anchor, is the author of Your
Life Calling: Reimagining the Rest of Your Life and Skywriting: A Life Out of
the Blue [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Source image: Matthew Eisman/Getty
Images]To talk about these issues, Fast Company brought together CBS Sunday
Morning anchor Jane Pauley, who has been open about having bipolar disorder;
entrepreneurs Andy Dunn and Paul English, who have shared their own struggles
with mental illness; and mental health and well-being advocates Alicia Keys and
Amit Paley, CEO of the Trevor Project.



Jane Pauley: Two years of working from home—either in isolation or with toddlers
or teenagers underfoot—has been very difficult. The sense of anxiety and grief
has been unrelenting. It seems as if everyone is willing to talk about mental
health more openly.

advertisement




Singer-songwriter Alicia Keys, winner of 15 Grammys, wrote the memoir More
Myself: A Journey, and founded Keys Soulcare, a clean skincare and wellness
brand. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg, Source images: 52nd NAACP Image
Awards/BET/Getty Images, James Devaney/GC Images/Getty Images]Alicia Keys: So
many of us are going through [mental wellness issues] because the world we’re
living in is unrelenting. At some point, we have to figure out how we are
relating to ourselves within that.



Pauley: Two days ago, my colleague asked me, “How are you?” I told them that
I’ve not been doing that great. I’m like the millions of Americans who have kind
of slogged through the last two years. There has been depression and there has
been some anxiety. And yet [until then] I hadn’t mentioned it to anybody at
work. It felt empowering. It felt liberating.



Amit Paley is the CEO and executive director of the Trevor Project, one of the
nation’s leading suicide prevention organizations, which serves LGBTQ youth.
[Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Source image: Gary Gershoff/WireImage/Getty
Images]Amit Paley: It is so important that people know that it is okay not to be
okay. When we’re not feeling that way, it’s important to talk about it and share
that with other people.



advertisement


Paul English: Secrecy and shame are the enemy of healing. I was diagnosed as
being bipolar at age 25. Initially, I started talking to a few people, like one
sibling, one friend, one person at work. I wanted someone from each of those
three elements of my life to know what’s going on so they could keep an eye on
me and help me when I was going off the deep end, on the depressive side, or
flip side, on the manic end. I had those people watching out for me. Over time,
over the years, I started to become open to more people.



Paul English has cofounded several successful tech companies, including Kayak
and GetHuman, and is CEO of Boston Venture Studio; he also helped create the
peer to-peer group Bipolar Boston. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg; Boston
Globe/Getty Images]Andy Dunn: In the year 2000, I was spiraling. It was the turn
of the millennium. I remember seeing a video of people praying on TV for the
arrival of the Messiah. And I came to the conclusion—through a mixture of
drinking and my unraveling mental state—that [the Messiah] was me. I ended up
[having a manic episode and] spending a week in a hospital and going on
medication. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder type 1. I couldn’t process it.
I felt so much humiliation and shame over the manic episode that to acknowledge
what had happened would be to acknowledge the diagnosis. I decided, “You know
what? It’s not true. It can’t be true.” I just decided everything was normal.



I was symptom-free for eight years. Then in the formative years of building
Bonobos, I experienced catatonic depression and a cofounder breakup, and we were
always six weeks or six months away from running out of money. I began
medicating my good moods with alcohol and treating my depressive moods with
silence and secrecy. Then 16 years after the diagnosis, I had a second
catastrophic psychotic episode in New York. That was when the journey [to
managing the disorder] began.

advertisement




Entrepreneur and investor Andy Dunn cofounded Bonobos, served as its CEO, and
oversaw its acquisition by Walmart in 2017. He is the author of the new memoir
Burn Rate. [Illustration: Miriam Stasbourg]Pauley: Paul, why do you think you
had a different attitude toward disclosure? You were up front about your
experience with bipolar, even at the beginning of your career.



English: One thing I learned as a young executive at a software company is that
often you take somebody early in their career, they get promoted, and then
[they] get hit with imposter syndrome and feel incompetent. The secret I’ve
learned about imposter syndrome is [that] if you’re vulnerable to your team and
you acknowledge the things you’re not good at, you’re not hiding anything
anymore.

> We don’t invest in the whole being. We invest in the physical. But we don’t
> invest in the mental.”

Alicia Keys, singer and entrepreneur

Keys: I think we all deal with this idea that we’re supposed to be perfect in
some way. The same thing happened to me when I was 20. You don’t even know who
you are at 20. You’re a little bit of what your mama told you. You’re a little
bit of what the world told you. And then you’re supposed to go off into the
world.

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[Early in my career] people watched [me] intently. I’m a New Yorker. I didn’t
want people to violate me. I immediately put up a wall, but I put up the worst
kind of wall: the one that you pretend is not there. You think you’re protecting
yourself but you’re actually hurting yourself. All I knew to do was just to fake
it till you make it. Once I stopped doing that—which I have to remind myself to
do every day—I started to feel much more honest, because I didn’t have to
pretend.

Pauley: When I disclosed to my colleague the other day that I wasn’t feeling
that great, I also said to her, there’s really nothing I expect work to do for
me. I don’t know if I should have expected more. What responsibilities does a
workplace have? Who in the workplace is responsible for an individual’s health?

Paley: There’s a traditional view of the workplace: People put their lives to
the side, come to work, and then they would go back to their life. We’re
evolving toward a model where people can bring part of their lives into the
workplace, because you don’t stop being a human being [when you go to work].

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English: I think the main responsibility we have as business leaders, when it
comes to mental health—and really all health issues—is to let your team know
that you have their back, and you’ll be there for them when they’re struggling.
I’ve found that it’s been helpful to my team when they hear me be vulnerable. At
appropriate times, I’ll be open in smaller groups. I think that gives other
people the permission to be open.

When you look at business leaders, people follow confidence, but they are loyal
to vulnerability. For me, it’s about creating a community where people are
helping each other, starting from the leadership team. Managers need to
demonstrate that they care about people’s well-being, even extending to the
health of their [employees’] families. It’s going to end up hurting your
business if [an employee] can’t function because they’re having an issue at home
that they can’t deal with.

> I hope the business community can speak with one voice to say, ‘Everyone
> deserves care. Everyone should get mental health care support when they need
> it.’”

Amit Paley, the Trevor Project

Paley: We also want to make sure that we are supporting young people who are
going through different challenges, especially in this period with COVID and the
national and global reckoning on racial injustice and racial violence. For LGBTQ
young people, there are now constant attacks [on them] in states across the
country. It’s important [to] recognize that that pressure impacts different
types of people disproportionately. In mental health and in social science, it’s
what’s known as the minority stress model. People who might be LGBTQ or people
of color face discrimination and pressure to conform in certain ways. We want
[employees] who bring different perspectives [to work]. Leaders need to provide
them [with] the different support that they need, and know that’s impacting
their mental health.

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It’s important to create an environment where your employees can be safe and
supported. That includes [creating] a culture where people can feel like they
can bring their full selves to work and talk about what they’re going through.
That also means that you are taking visible steps to stand up for the people on
your team and speaking out when there are injustices happening in the world that
disproportionately impact them.

Keys: I would jump on the heels of what Amit said about culture, about setting
the table for openness. If you have a weekly meeting, or a weekly or monthly
video call—much of my company works remotely—or a big board meeting, whatever
the case is, you can set the stage and say, “It’s important to me that we are
not only doing well in our business, but we’re well in our lives and that our
families are well.”

Dunn: I was starting a new company, and I remember disclosing to everyone that I
was writing [my new memoir, Burn Rate] and what it was about. My heart was going
200 beats a minute, assuming that everyone was going to be ready to quit
afterward. I got off the call and chatted with someone. I said, “That was
terrible.” And they said, “No. That was incredible.” And that changed the
company’s culture.

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> When you look at business leaders, people follow confidence, but they are
> loyal to vulnerability.”

Paul English, entrepreneur

English: I’ve started five software companies at this point, and because my
teams have taken care of employees, they tend to follow me and my team, company
to company. When you’re recruiting a new person and they see someone who’s been
with you for 10 to 20 years, or even longer, they think there must be something
good happening here. This must be a company that takes care of people.

Pauley: When I wrote [my 2001 memoir, Skywriting], someone asked me why I would
come forward about mental health. I said, innocently, “Because I could afford
to.” I didn’t mean financially. Nobody was talking about the privilege then.

Dunn: You’re right, Jane. We’re at a moment when, if we have the privilege of
having had success, if we have the privilege of having had the financial
resources to get the treatment that we need, we can be more open about our
mental health.

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Paley: The entire infrastructure of mental health care in this country is
fundamentally broken. We do not have enough mental health care providers. Of the
ones that we do have, many of them are not available to populations who need
them most: They’re not available in rural areas, they are not competent or
trained in how to interact with people of color or how to interact with LGBTQ
people.

Dunn: Just on the way here, I got a text message from my psychiatrist, who I try
to see twice a week. And he said, “How much was your reimbursement?” And I said,
“It’s about 5%.” And I thought [about] all the people out there who aren’t going
to pay the 95% out of pocket, because they can’t afford it. We have medical
insurance. We have vision and dental. But what about mental health insurance? I
think we really need to be led by Fortune 500 companies here. They have to make
the investment to enable people to get the care that they need.

Keys: That’s a powerful thing you just said, Andy. The fact that mental wellness
is a privilege is horrible. The fact that that’s how we deal with it, and it’s
like, “If you could pay for it, you can have it,” is horrendous. We don’t invest
in the whole being. We invest in the physical. But we don’t invest in the
mental.

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Paley: It’s important that we think about the whole system. A lot of businesses
and business leaders are being thrust into the position of providing mental
health care for their employees, which is something they should do. But business
leaders and companies can also call on the government to fix this broken system.
I hope we can speak with one voice—the business community and every community—to
say, “Everyone deserves care. Everyone should get mental health care support
when they need it.”

This roundtable has been edited for length and clarity.


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