As part of World Mental Health Day on Tuesday, a special conference was held that focused on adult mental health care in the workplace, and how to navigate challenges in today’s fast-paced corporate environment.
Issues such as dealing with anxiety at work can be common, says Sutton Burke, clinical director of Infinite Mind Care, joint host of the conference along with Kelly Holding. Therefore, it is important to recognise when stress at work triggers mental health challenges and then get the necessary help, she explained.
“The biggest thing that we talked about was actually allowing yourself to feel it and accept that you are having anxiety and not run away from the feeling. You really need to sit with it and also keep working. So don’t run away from the work. Don’t quit your job. Don’t take extra time off. Sit with it, understand your triggers… what’s causing that anxiety and really see what you can do for it,” she said.
Sometimes, Burke added, dealing with anxiety in the workplace may take confronting what is causing the issue and actually working on it – such as volunteering to make a presentation instead of avoiding it if that is something that causes stress.
This also includes, she said, “making sure that you practise assertiveness skills or gain assertiveness skills and communication skills so you can… express your needs to your employer and other employees that you work with.”
‘Real area of need’
The conference, held at the Camana Bay Cinema, featured sessions on productivity, mental blocks, achieving full potential and dealing with mental health trauma.
The theme of the conference was ‘Working Productively, Coping Effectively’. Kelly Holding CEO Rhonda Kelly said she wanted to craft an event that delved into issues within the workplace as it was a “real area of need”.
“Being an older adult myself, I just think that many of us have never really spoken about mental health. My experience with my daughter opened my eyes to mental health challenges, but before that I was really not aware of taking care of my mental health or understanding it or being educated about it,” she said.
Kelly said she thinks there are a lot of people like her in the workplace who do not realise why they feel sometimes the way they do, or why they respond the way they do to others or situations.
“Hopefully this event will help people kind of learn that this is why I feel like that, but then sometimes understanding [those] that they work with in a different way,” she said.
Cayman, she said, has come a long way in confronting mental health issues, but she said there is still “need for improvement”.
“We’re much more open about it, [but] there are still stigmas around it. In the Caribbean, we tend to kind of shy away from talking about our mental health or we tend to bury things deep inside,” she said.
However, Kelly said events like the conference allow people to come to a comfortable place, interact with others and listen to the presentations.
“It’ll give them a chance to reflect and… [consider], ‘I do need to… think about maybe going to see a therapist or maybe talking to someone’… Hopefully that will open the conversation, which is what we all hope to do,” she added.
Burke said at the end of the day there is no health without mental health.
“I hope that people leave here today with some tools on how to better themselves, how to feel good when they are in the workplace, outside the workplace, when they are by themselves, when they’re with their families,” she added.
Related Videos
