Kind Regards, Part 3

Letters to our bosses about how to help with mental health

At A Lust for Life we are inundated with requests from companies and managers about how to help talk about mental health in the workplace, and how to support a colleague who may have mental health issues. We asked people who have had mental health problems to write anonymously to their bosses to tell them what good support looks like.

If you’d like to help improve workplace responses to mental health, please write an anonymous letter to your boss by emailing editor@alustforlife.com. You don’t need any identifying information, just tell your boss what they did well (if anything) and what they should try to do in future.

Here’s the latest letter in this series.

Dear Senior Colleague

Thank you for listening so well when I was struggling. Thanks for allowing me to let my guard down and be fully human at a very vulnerable time, when I was confused and anxious and scared. Thanks for hearing, for staying. Thanks for your presence, compassion and flexibility.

Thanks for all the ways you made it clear to me you saw my potential not in spite of this, but including this. Thanks for how quickly you usually responded to my scared, sometimes frantic, too frequent, terrified emails. Thanks for how you tried to support a change in my placement when it became clear continuing where I was would be too hard. Thanks for the hugs, maybe that most of all.

When I struggled with your colleague not understanding, you told me to come see you straight away and when I cried, tears came into your eyes. That meant so much to me as I felt frozen and scared and that I had laid myself open and wasn’t being responded to by others.

Thanks for being the one who responded. When everything went wrong and the walls came down after I left and I had a crisis thanks for being kind when we met again. Thanks for buying me a drink, giving me a hug. Thanks for just being normal, when you could.

I wish it had been easier after that, but of course, things deteriorated  we had some excruciating breakdowns in communication and difficult encounters that haunt me. Everyone was between a rock and a hard place and I understand how challenging and stressful it must have been.

When I made the complaint about how my disclosure was handled, I knew there would be consequences. I felt so guilty I couldn’t just drop it, and yet I just couldn’t- nothing made sense in how it was being met and I couldn’t manage to step away from that alone. No one would speak to me! I felt like such a freak.

Thanks for looking out for me as best you could in a stressful meeting about my complaint. Thank you for being the human in the room, for being real, for not being some cardboard cutout that appeared to feel nothing about the utter devastation the handling of my mental illness had brought to me in this place, after a lifetime of working with people with no issues or concerns.

I was so angry that meeting was facilitated so poorly, that all the questions I had asked to be answered were unaddressed. I was livid that when you were honest about your process in that meeting and how hard you found some of it, to see that being met with the same non responding and indifference as I had experienced. It was infuriating and heartbreaking. Thank you for being your whole self, anyway.

Seeing that honesty and humanity gave me the anger to say what I needed to, and there was some movement and peace from that, though I knew that choosing away from being a nice, good girl in that moment and “letting rip” would make repair much harder and maybe impossible.

I am still glad I said what I had to say, for me, even if it wasn’t heard, or never could be. I really don’t know if any of it landed, or not.. but I stood up in that moment for myself in a way I could hardly have imagined. A part of me is very proud of that, and a part of me beats myself up still for not having been able to conduct a miracle in that room to fix it all cordially and effectively.

Thanks for all the small ways since you have indicated a willingness to be patient, to be human, to be kind – when so many people stare through me now, so many people cut me off. Thanks for the dignity and integrity you bring to this. I know even despite this your heart must sink when you see my name pop up, given how up and down things have been, how lacking in predictability and stability. So double thanks for your persistence. One night, you liked a post of mine on Twitter and I wept for an hour at the kindness of it.

I have learned a lot from this – all these good points, and all the ones we both might rather forget. The main point is this.  The moment human communication is blocked between parties where mental distress is concerned is the moment things become impossible, destructive and relationship-destroying. That moment robs everyone of the ability to meet eachother with dignity.

Finding ways to show or communicate small kindnesses that really demonstrate that a person is still seen as just a struggling human doing their best can be the difference, at certain points in mental distress, between life and death. It seems so simple, yet it has profound effects.

Without those kindnesses from you along the way, I truly doubt I would still be here. It gave me enough space to stay, enough belief to persist, enough courage to stand up and fight for the right to be heard, enough resilience to cope with the fallout of not being seen or heard or responded to. All of that has sustained me not just in slowly rebuilding professionally, but in bringing some compassion and understanding to how very hard and very human it is to have a tricky mind that doesn’t always trust or listen the body it lives in.

You helped me survive the very worst time of my life, and grieve all those times before I had suppressed and avoided that were destroying me.  Not by having all the right answers, or doing all the right things, but just by showing up and taking the risk to be fully human, even when it was a really painful situation in an institutional context where I was little more than a reputational hazard, collateral damage.

I’ll never be able to thank you enough for modelling that, and in how it still fell apart despite your best efforts, all the ways it forced me to confront my own limitations and bring me to accept I needed to really engage with professional help in a serious way. It has changed everything, and it shapes me still as I continue to recover. I am determined I will flourish yet. Thanks for your part in making me believe again that’s still possible.

Take care,
Fiona