Mind Over Matter: Mental Fitness and the Workplace

“According to the 2011 report, ‘Building Mentally Healthy Workplaces: Perspectives of Canadian Workers and Front-Line Managers,’ workplaces are heavily impacted by mental health issues. We also know that mental illness affects all of us sooner or later and that one-in-five Ontarians will experience mental illness first-hand.”

- The Chatham Daily News

“…the effects of mental health and addiction on our health care system should not be underestimated, nor should the ripple effects felt in the justice, educational and social service sectors.”

- The Drummond Report

We get that bullying is harmful.  We get that a silo-mentality results in duplication, gaps and overlaps in service delivery.  We see that an aggressive focus on getting ahead at the expense of others leads to social fracturing.  We’re even seeing the impacts of aggressive, uncooperative approaches in our political system.

What we need to do now is connect the dots.  Who we are, as individuals, is a direct product of what happens in our heads.  What our brain does is heavily influenced by what’s going on in our environments.  This isn’t a philosophical statement; it’s fact.  Look at the research papers in the left column of this blog for the evidence.

The same thing applies at the social level; what we do as individuals impacts the well-being and functioning of our society.  Governments around the world are looking for ways to address the global mental health crisis at the same time as they’re looking to address our economic challenges.  They want ideas, they want innovation; they want to reduce service uptake, fraud, etc.  We all want better customer service, rewarding work, lives that have meaning.

All of it, all the positives and the negatives we feel, all the individual and broad social behaviours we engage in – they’re all neuro-chemical in origin.

The thing we stigmatize the most – our mental health, our biologically-situated minds – is the source of all our social solutions, as well as a great many of our social challenges.

You can’t land on the right answer if you haven’t identified the correct problem.

At the end of the day, it’s really a question of mind over matter.

Look at the Conference Board of Canada’s report, here.