We need to break the Taboo around Mental Health
What is Mental Health Awareness Week all about? For me, it’s around breaking the taboo around having conversations about it, especially in professional contexts., which is no easy task. But we can all play a part, and I believe that starts with digging deep and sharing our own experiences around mental health.
There are many things about myself that my personal and professional network knows about me. I’m passionate about changing the way business is done, I’m a brunette, I live in Brighton, I’ve started up a business, and maybe even that I am a biker. But until recently, only a handful of people in my life knew that I experienced a few years of extreme social anxiety a few years ago.
And why would anyone know? I didn’t tell people. I shared posts on social media that focused on success, joy, connectedness. I made excuses when invited to connect with people in person and generally did a pretty good job of making sure no one knew I was absolutely terrified every moment or every day.
It’s been around five years now since I can say that social anxiety didn’t dictate my life, and as I look back on the toughest years of my life, I am aware of how detrimental shame was to the experience and the taboo that exists around talking about mental health. I wasn’t reading about people I aspired to be like talking about anxiety and depression, so assumed if I was stopped in my tracks by anxiety, I wasn’t going to be able to become the person I wanted to be.
What I’ve discovered for myself over the years, however, as I mustered up the courage to talk to people about my challenges, was that it wasn’t just something that some people also experienced. It was actually more rare to talk to someone who hadn’t experience some form of mental health experience.
And the more I talked, the more the shame began to disappear and the easier it was to muster up the courage to live the life I wanted for myself.
It’s why I decided last year, with support from people closest to me, to start sharing my own experience with social anxiety - to break the taboo around mental health conversations, so that we can remove the shame and live our biggest dreams.
I spoke with Alice Reeves, from BelongCon, about my experience with social anxiety and how I got from there to becoming the person I am today. Take a listen below.
CW: anxiety, panic attacks, fear of death, social anxiety, mental health
Now comes your part.
If you know someone whom you think would benefit from hearing my story because of what they are dealing with, I ask that you share the link to this post with them. It took a lot to share this story, and still makes me anxious when I put it out into the world, but I know that if even one person sees something new for themselves and the life they want to live after hearing it, it’s worth it.
Mental Health in the Workplace
If you’re interested in discovering what, as a business, you can do to create an environment that supports your team’s wellbeing, especially in these uncertain times where anxiety is high, listen to the conversation I had with Projects.