Shared Solutions: Mental Health, Schools and the Workplace

Social media.  Youth.  Proactive engagement.  Safety - and mental health.  In the workplace, even.

 

Here's three projects that can only benefit through collaboration:

 

Ontario's Ministry of Labour is holding a video contest for secondary school students or youth aged 18-24. Use your creativity to develop an original video, up to two minutes long, to stress the importance of working safely on the job or about your rights to be paid fairly for the work that you do. The contest closes on April 5th. To apply, please visit www.labour.gov.on.ca.

 

Children's Mental Health Ontario is holding their annual Change the View video contest, encouraging youth to make a video demonstrating what students' schools can do to create a supportive environment for students experiencing mental health issues and addictions.

 

The Federal Ministry of Labour has created a set of voluntary standards to promote psychologically safe workplaces; a great initiative that needs to be advertised as far and wide as possible.

 

You simply can't ask for better opportunities to develop shared solutions, find efficiency of resources and get best bang for your buck.

 

This has to happen.

 

Support This Bill

Elliott’s bill, partly inspired by Holly, calls for the creation of a select committee to address the “urgent need” for a comprehensive developmental services strategy to address the needs of Ontarians with intellectual disabilities and those dually diagnosed with intellectual disabilities plus mental illnesses.

 

 

We don't tell asthmatics to "get over" their conditions, nor do we tell people who are visually or hearing impaired to just suck it up and move on.  We do, however, completely undermine the significance of mental illnesses and cognitive development.  We stigmatize people as "dumb" or "crazy" and just assume they are doomed to a life on the periphery of society.

 

Mental illness and addictions cost the Ontario economy $39 billion annually.  By 2020, mental illness will be the number one cost driver of disability claims.  These claims, plus drug costs and employee assistance programs set the private sector back at least $2.1 billion annually.  Our reactive at best, laissez faire at worst approach just isn't working.

 

Christine Elliot is the real deal - she understands and cares about mental health.  She's not the only MPP who's passionate about this issue.  We need to support them in making this Bill a reality and ensuring it's intent translates into meaningful action.

 

Really, we can't afford not to.

 

The Global Mental Health Crisis: A Bubble Soon to Burst?

"The urgency is very clear," she said. "It's kind of like hearing about the initial banks that failed, then the whole housing market. I'd hate for the whole system to fail before people wake up and respond to this as the true crisis that it is."

It has been recognized there is a global mental health crisis.  The OECD has mental health very much in mind.  Countries like Australia and the UK have recognized the fundamental truth that you can't have health without mental health; the mind, after all, is simply another system in the body.  Here in Canada, we have our first national mental health strategy - from a government that doesn't believe in nationalized anything.

That shows how seriously people at the highest levels take this emerging crisis.

Yet, economic times are tight and when there really is no more money to be spent, services like mental health are among the first to get trimmed.  Worse still; on the whole, people still don't get mental health.  The recent CAMH Defeat Denial campaign brilliantly sets out the common responses people with mental illnesses have.

Adding to the challenge - the way we look at work is completely counterinuitive to the way mental health functions.  Micro-managing bosses are convinced that their approach is both right and necessary; they have the gold, they make the rules, employees owe them for the right to work and therefore must be at their beck-and-call 24/7, since work cycles now run without end.  Have you ever told a micromanager that their "management style" is actually detrimental to business functioning and damaging your state of mental health?  If you don't get fired, you'll probably hear one of the defeat denial lines.

Which is why people suffer in silence.  Nobody wants to be judged and know that if they speak out, that's exactly what will happen.  Heartbreakingly, that's often as true for the micromanagers (see micromanaging disorder) as it is for the micromanaged.  As we're afraid of labels or are concerned about ourselves or the nation becoming overmedicated, we simply try to ignore the realities of mental health.  When we do that, we're missing the obvious, affordable but ultimately frightening solution that's really all that's left to us: culture change.

As a society, we need to rethink the way we view mental health - which will mean challenging some confabulated notions we have about identity and self-control.  Neurscience has already got the information - we just need to accept and internalize it.  We need to revamp the way we look at work and motivation.  We also need to understand cognitive development more closely and keep how individual brains work in mind as we develop our next models of education.

In short, we need to stop focusing on curing lead poisoning and start taking the lead out of our water.  This is all possible - we can make our systems work more efficiently, fostering better outcomes - if we do so consciously and proactively.

That's the challenge of the 21st Century - our cognitive equivalent to the labour movement that stemmed from the Industrial Revolution. 

Welcome to the Conscious Revolution.

There's More to Mental Health Than Just Illness

When it comes to politics, most of us react with our paleomammalian brain. We only think we’re basing our preferences on reason.

Of course, we kinda know this already. 

See, there's more to this mental health thing than just the illness part.

Which is why we seriously need to start rethinking what it is we know.

"I'm not a monster - I'm just ahead of the curve."

Premier McGuinty: The Best Consultants Are Yet to be Tapped

Nobody wants to accept the gloomy economic growth projections on which Mr. Drummond’s cost-cutting recommendations were predicated, but nobody knows exactly how to beat them.

There was more meaning to the Drummond Report than just doom and gloom.

Many of the brilliant, bold ideas that will take us through our current challenges won't come from top-dollar consultants.  They'll come from an increasingly engaged populace and an amazing group of emerging social entrepreneurs.  A heightened focus on breaking down service silos and reducing duplication, gaps and overlaps is essential.  This means culture change, always a challenge, but facilitated by people not of the system who still believe in its value.

If Premier McGuinty is really looking for new solutions to some of our most challenging problems, I would suggest he send out staff to attend Why Should I Care events (next one's on Monday May 28 at the Duke of York, starting 6:30pm) to hear some interesting conversations around what hasn't worked and what's being considered by officialdom, with lots of fresh ideas from the floor about how to make our system work.  Organizer Terri Chu always has interesting, sometimes provocative line-up of speakers that touch on their subjects in direct, powerful ways.

The Premier himself should bend the ear of Tonya Surman at the Centre for Social Innovation.  The team of social entrepreneurs who have collected there are pursuing a wealth of interesting new initiatives ranging from new training tools for employees, the use of microfluidics to make anything to do with liquid (ie, blood samples) easier, or simple stuff like turning store waste into energy and creating new aggregate models for services.  Then, there's the growing link between health care costs, mental health and productivity, say nothing of quality-of-life.  Looking at mental health proactively, rather than reactively, is going to change much of everything.

Tomorrow's solutions won't be cultivated at the top; they're being formulated right now by the social entrepreneurs working their way up from the bottom.

CMHO's Change the View Anti-Stigma Video Awards

Ask kids to visualize what mental illness is and how it's stigmatized, you get some pretty amazing results. 

Check out these videos from Children's Mental Health Ontario's ChangeTheView winners.

The Conscious Revolution: Peering Into the Looking Glass

Globally, the economy is in a precarious place.  The traditional models of wealth generation and circulation are proving unsustainable at all levels.  People on both ends of the increasingly polarized social spectrum need to take a hard look at what they value, what they feel they deserve and what their commitment to society should be on the macro and mirco levels.

There’s a mental health crisis that’s been recognized internationally, too – suicides, anxiety and depression, increased awareness of and empathy for those suffering from conditions ranging from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia to ADHD and post-partum depression.

Social media is connecting the world in hyper-kinetic ways.  As of right now, we really do have a networked intelligence – the question is, how consciously and effectively can we harness it?  How well are we leveraging our global information transfer network?

Everyone is talking about the challenges and need for significant change in our economic, political and social institutions.  The classes that have led the Capitalist system through boom and bust are trapped in models of yore, uncertain what to do next.

They are turning to social entrepreneurs (the creative types who see money as a base-line for sustainable living and are more interested in creating social meaning with their work) for solutions.

The models that are successfully empowering and promoting social entrepreneurs (Google, CSI) take an active approach to workplace wellness and cognitive workplace design – there’s a whole emerging field just starting to crackle that will combine psychology, kinesiology and interior design in developing the cognitive workplace, spaces designed to enhance creativity and productivity.  

Globally, the increasingly focused (and centrally coordinated) efforts to address mental illness are going to collide with the economic and social challenges in ways that might be surprising.  Poor work design and an education system that focuses on mass-produced rote-learning actually foster anxiety and depression, while not developing the practical skills needed for success in tomorrow’s economy.  At the same time, we are still feeling our way through alternative cognitive ability diagnoses and accommodations, with a long way to go before we get it right.  We can’t afford to be losing productivity and having so many people reliant on the healthcare system.

What we need to start doing is tap into these potentials effectively; we can no longer afford to have the future Steve Jobs’, Albert Einsteins and Winston Churchills succeed by luck of timing or geography – we need everyone to reach and harness their full cognitive potential.

Society is being forced to change the way we view work and education to support the latent talents that will fuel the Knowledge Economy.  The natural source of inspiration and ideation for this cognitive revolution will be the social entrepreneurs – people who on the whole are concerned about the environment and looking at sustainable practices that also create business opportunities:

-          Increased integration through social media

-      A shift towards shared, networked-learning that encourages students (and employees) to be active participants in planning and executing their education

-          Increased critical thinking in politics, vs model-based partisan loyalties

-          A growing reliance on social entrepreneurs and horizontally integrated idea-sharing as a vehicle for growth and policy directions

-          Mental health care begins to become more proactive, with appropriate accommodative measures built into work, education, etc.

-          The Cognitive Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution before it, will reshape our society around a more conscious Capitalism.

Welcome to the 21^st Century; welcome to the Conscious Society.

Change Your View Of Mental Health

People of diverse challenges coming together to develop a shared message about hope for the future.

This is what it's all about; changing the view, consciously, so that together, we can build a better world.

Some amazing videos forthcoming.