Changing the Conversation about Mental Health: My Life on The Continuum

I became a passionate advocate for mental health in 2008, when my best friend killed herself. I channeled all of my hurt and grief into a personal crusade to do whatever I could to attack the stigma that had kept her silent. I became a Champion for the Mentally Ill.

Because Megan lost her battle with depression, I saw her as one of them: the Mentally Ill. Even though I was reeling, desperately sad and confused, drowning in my own shock and anger, I didn’t identify what was happening to me as my own mental health challenge – I was fine, I was coping. Because this is how I – and the rest of the world – understood Mental Illness: as a binary thing. You either have it, or you don’t. I didn’t have it. She did, and it cost her her life. So I buried my sorrow and channeled it into a personal crusade to save the Mentally Ill.

The Old Model:

source: Mental Health Commission of Canada, "The Working Mind"

As the years passed, I kept working, living a busy life with lots of commitments. I organized a national conference, with a keynote panel discussion on mental health. I told Megan’s story to anyone who would listen. My message: don’t be afraid to ask for help. Suicide is devastating to all those left behind. Above all, we have an obligation to have compassion for the Mentally Ill. I reached out to colleagues who were struggling, offering an ear and supporting them as best I could as they tried to navigate a workplace culture that also embraced this simplistic binary notion of mental illness.

But as campaigns like Bell Let’s Talk and Do It For Daron began to shift the momentum in the public conversation, we started talking about Mental Health rather than focusing on Mental Illness. Champions like Clara Hughes showed us, by telling their personal stories, that we all share experiences that challenge our mental health. We began to collectively accept the fact that we had to let go of the stigma around mental illness and begin to look at it differently. The efforts of the Mental Health Commission of Canada, supported by an infusion of  corporate dollars and a growing public will to do this important work, began to coalesce,  and I believe we are already saving lives as a result.

This year, my passion for mental health advocacy happily collided with the awakening of my employer, the Government of Canada to The Cause I embraced all those years ago. The FederalPublic Service Mental Health Strategy is built around meeting three basic goals: 1) changing the culture, 2) building a common understanding (through training), and 3) using an evidence-based approach (i.e. using real measures to both identify the issues, and articulate clear goals against which progress can be measured). That reframes all kinds of conversations, ranging from organizational culture change, to internal communications and engagement, performance management, and human resources.

The Mental Health Continuum: a Transformational Concept

I have trained over three decades to respond to imperatives like this. I have learned that, to begin to change culture, you start by changing the conversation. Drawing from my knowledge and experience as a change agent, and as a well-seasoned communications and PR specialist, I believe that the key lies in finding a transformational concept around which to begin to reframe the conversation.

And The Mental Health Continuum is where we can start to do that.

In the old was of thinking, mental health was seen as a binary thing – we were either “well” or “ill”. Even leaving aside for a moment the fact that we had absolutely no skills in how to interact with the Mentally Ill, the fundamental flaw in the model is that is sets up a Them and Us relationship between those in crisis and those who need to respond to it. Any conversation – whether it is about performance, or concern for the employee’s wellbeing – starts from the premise that if you’re not “healthy”, you’re “ill”.

Enter the new model:

source: Mental Health Commission of Canada, "The Working Mind"

In the new Mental Health Continuum, I found my “a-ha” moment as a change agent – and in my own mental health. By recognizing that we all live in flux, somewhere along a Continuum across which we move between the two extremes of  “healthy” and “ill”, we change the conversation from one based on a dynamic of Them (the “ill”) and Us (the “healthy”), to one based on WE.

This is the place where I live. All of my PR skills, and my lived experience, are coming to roost here in this, my new purpose. I will do everything in my power to help this Movement succeed. As it applies to my work in The Service, we are on a mission to make our workplace a kinder, gentler, and yes, more productive place, where people share a sense of community and a connection to our common purpose of Public Service.

We all live on the Continuum.

Most of us – we hope – live on the healthy side. But life is tough. Sometimes it’s brutal. We have experiences that change who we are. We all experience great sadness, crises of confidence, horrific tragedy. The key to embracing this new construct and realizing its power, is to recognize that we all have a role to play in our collective Mental Health story. At work, and in our personal relationships, we have an obligation to do what we can to create a safer place in which people can go through their “reacting” and “injured”, and come back to “healthy” -- just as we have a responsibility to provide first aid when someone is physically hurt, and support each other in times of crisis. And we have an invitation to embrace our own Mental Health story.

It translates beautifully in a corporate system like The Public Service, because you can institutionalize all of the required supports to make it work: you can define and measure success, clearly articulate goals, define roles, and establish ground rules such that you are set up to succeed. It’s a controllable environment, with levers readily available to be used positively. For my work, call it Internal Communications, Employee Engagement, whatever you like, at its core, it’s about changing a conversation.

My First Aid Training has now given me a language and a lexicon for breaking that down in practical terms, and fully stepping in to my role as a storyteller. I understand now how I can honour my responsibility as a member of my work community and as a mental health advocate. The key to the Continuum is in being self-aware, and vigilant in our care of others. It is the intensity and the duration of the time any of us spends in the “ill” box that makes the difference. Without the tools to cope, without a strategy – without a positive construct for a conversation about mental health – people have historically been getting stuck in “injured”. And over time, that becomes “ill”.

But with the Continuum, we can acknowledge that WE all have those moments. If we all live this story together, we can all find our way to play a part in creating an environment that is healthy, safe, and supportive, and ultimately - to apply it to the business context - highly productive.

But wait, there’s more: Embracing The Continuum -- A Personal Story

My first husband was an undiagnosed manic depressive, and I was working three jobs to keep us afloat. Man, was that hard. Meanwhile, a dear friend was dying of cervical cancer, living with her step-dad north of Toronto. I moved there to be with her, to help care for her, and taught my classes online, commuting back to Ottawa for the occasional “conjugal” visit. There was more than one occasion when I entertained the fantasy that a simple flick of the wrist would end my misery as I flew down the 401. But no, I wasn’t “ill” – I kept functioning. My friend died, and soon afterwards, my first husband and I divorced, and I felt “healthy” again.

I subsequently met and married The Man of My Dreams. A fully-functioning, healthy man with passion, an artist with a very special voice I believe the world needs to hear. Together, we have built an amazing life. I fell in love with his daughter, and he and I got matching tattoos to celebrate the arrival of our first grandchild four years ago. We survived a full-house renovation, our relationship stronger because of it. We have a deep connection and a healthy, respectful relationship; we show the best of ourselves to each other, and above else are always honest about how we are feeling.

This spring, my husband of 13 years told me he wasn’t happy in the marriage, and last week, he declared that he wanted to separate. My world tilted, and I fell into a big pool of Sadness. I was sad to contemplate life without him. Very sad. Mind-numbingly sad. Physically hurting sad. I talked to my manager. I contacted EAP. I saw a therapist. We talked about how I was coping – quite well, intellectually, I knew what I needed to do to support my partner. But I cried, I raged at the traffic, I wasn’t sleeping well, and I began to worry that, fight as I might, I was becoming “ill”.

Even as recently as a few months ago, I still saw Megan as the emblem of “ill”, and myself as “healthy” – and lived in fear of becoming like her. Meanwhile, deep down, I knew I wasn’t “healthy” all the time. And that scared me. But I didn’t think about killing myself. I just procrastinated a bit, maybe. I honoured my commitments, always – my training is too deeply ingrained, and I was always able to get the gumption up to pull an all-nighter if need be. I was ALWAYS there in the crunch – I even became a crisis communications specialist while my first marriage was breaking down. I wrote a blog about being a “functioning depressive”. I was coping, I thought.

But then, I met The Continuum, and since then, everything has begun to change. In the moment that I discovered that I am not “ill” – that I am simply living out a moment on the sad side of the Continuum - I began to cope better. I realized that I had been carrying my own stigma about those “ill” moments when they happened. Instead of fearing the blackness, I made peace with those moments, and took charge of my mental health with the confidence that I had it within myself to come through this in one piece, with my humanity and relationships intact. And with the Mental Health Framework, I have the resources I need to do whatever it takes to do that.

I’m a PR professional and change agent on a mission. But first and foremost, I am a human being. I now have to acknowledge that my relationship with my husband is going to become something else. Being sad, and knowing how important it is for me to allow myself to be emotional in those moments, I have been crying – a lot. But instead of seeing myself as broken – “ill” – I now know that I am “reacting” to a jarring change. I may even be dipping into “injured” now and then – and that’s ok. Sometimes I get a cough. Sometimes my knee hurts and I can’t walk very well. It’s the same thing. It’s another moment on a continuum of Wellness.

So, as I embrace my Life On The Continuum, I will use this journey in my role as a Mental Health Champion. I am committed to sharing my own personal story, in the hopes that you will see how we all are part of this evolving conversation about mental health.

So today, here is what’s going on with me. I am beyond excited about the confluence of my own personal search for meaning in Megan’s suicide, and this global movement to change the conversation about mental health. But I am also very, very sad to be separating from my husband. We have a wonderful relationship, and he is going through his own experience on The Continuum. His coping strategy is to ask for space, and we are working out how to do that through good conversation and much love. I believe that part of the reason I am able to go through this with him with compassion and respect is because I now recognize where any of my occasional hurtful, resentful thoughts originate: in a transient moment of “ill”ness. These thoughts are not the true me – they are just an expression of how I am feeling at a moment in time. So I don’t say mean things. I don’t lash out in anger. I cry, and I talk – and I walk through it. We walk through it.

So, as it turns out, I am a poster child for the Power of the Continuum. I no longer have to see myself as “ill” to acknowledge that I need to ask for help. I know that right now, as I am “reacting”, I need to take special care of my mental health, just as I would a torn knee ligament or a breast cancer scare. I am working with my manager to come up with a plan that gives me the space I need to do what I need to do first: take care of myself. The Framework empowers me to ask for that help. And as someone I work with loves to keep reminding me: just like we’re taught when flying in an airplane, we must first take care of ourselves before we can be of any use to others.

I will not be defined by the sadness I am feeling. Instead, I will use this experience to share my story with you about my Life on the Continuum. I will tell you how I am being accommodated, and how by embracing the Power of the Continuum, I will, I hope, be a better partner to the man I love. And, I hope, I will also be a voice for mental health advocacy, and a force for good in my workplace.