Mental health and self-care

Mental health in the workplace means talking openly about stress, illness and bad days instead of hiding them. Breaking the silence allows others to do the same. According to an EU report from 2018, one in six people in the EU have had a mental health issue, so those affected are present in every team.

Key Takeaways

• Talking openly about mental illness in the workplace lowers the inhibition threshold for others: As soon as Sophie Küster talked about her story at cronn, colleagues confided their own stories to her.
• According to the State of Health in the EU Report from 2018, 17% of the EU population had a problem with their mental health, which means that mental illness is statistically present in every team.
• Those who have a bad day and openly name it instead of covering it up protect the team from misinterpretations and enable mindful interaction.
• The first step in the event of suspected mental illness is to talk, whether to a trusted person, a hotline or a professional, and no sense of shame should prevent this.
• IT professions favor a pronounced perfectionism, which, according to Sophie Küster, in combination with a high workload and family obligations, is particularly detrimental to mental health.

Mental illness at work is more common than the silent mode suggests

According to the State of Health in the EU Report, 17% of the EU population had a problem with their mental health in 2018. If you extrapolate this to an average IT team, the topic has long been at the table, but nobody is talking about it.

Sophie Küster, Test Automation Engineer at cronn in Bonn, has experienced precisely this discrepancy. In her private life, she talked openly about depression, anxiety disorders and an eating disorder. At work, she kept quiet. She was diagnosed at the age of 22, while studying math. Time passed before things got back on track, and this time left its mark on her life.

It was precisely this resume that was the first point of friction with the world of work. A gap cannot be explained if you remain silent about its cause. The cover letter becomes a game of hide-and-seek, the interview an exercise in evasive maneuvers.

Why the CV becomes a trap if you’re not allowed to talk

A period of illness produces breaks in your career that, without context, look like laziness or failure. This is the core problem for those affected on the job market.

In her job interview, Sophie tried to avoid telling the truth and instead talked about how organizationally difficult her studies had been. She was hired anyway. The next day, her boss called again and asked directly why her studies had taken so long.

She told him about the eating disorder, but left out the rest. Her reasoning: An eating disorder might sound to outsiders like something you grow out of, rather than something that comes back when you’re stressed. Half the truth felt safer than the whole truth.

Many people are familiar with this calculation. You weigh up which part of your own story sounds just tolerable to someone who doesn’t know the subject. This costs energy and keeps the shame alive.

Clearing the air: a talk as a turning point

The break with silence came at a conference. At the Agile Testing Days, Sophie heard a talk about burnout that touched her deeply. She asked the speaker how he had explained to his boss why he hadn’t been at work. His answer: he had told the truth.

Back in the office, she had a performance review on her very first day. Exhausted and a little overconfident from the hustle and bustle of the conference, she decided to tell her boss the whole story. She has been talking about it ever since.

The second step was logical: she announced that she would take to the stage herself the following year. She didn’t dare at the first attempt, but the following year she did. she gave her talk for the first time in 2020. Since then, her story has been public.

Openness creates a pull that gets others talking

Speaking openly about a taboo subject gives others permission to do the same. This is the strongest effect that Sophie has observed in her environment.

She wasn’t the only one in the office, that quickly became clear. A colleague approached her: He also had a story that he never talked about and didn’t know how to start. Because she had been so open, he dared to confide in her. Shortly afterwards, he told the same story to other colleagues over lunch. A secret became a non-issue, in the best sense of the word.

I’ve had enough of being ashamed of it. It’s not my fault, it just happened to me and it shouldn’t really be a secret.

Sophie Küster

At a Eurostar conference in Copenhagen, her talk won the participants’ vote and was repeated on the last day in a redo session in front of around 300 people. During the talk, she could hardly look anywhere without seeing someone with tears in their eyes. She spent the afternoon talking to people about their stories.

Perfectionism and constant stress make IT a risky field

Test and development teams work under a lot of pressure, often combined with family commitments and energy-intensive hobbies. In addition, there is a widespread perfectionism that tugs at all areas of life.

This mixture is not a good breeding ground for mental stability, and yet there is a lack of space to address it. In agile teams, there is a lot of talk about communication and collaboration, but the personal level is usually left out. A beer together in the evening is no substitute for a real conversation about how someone is feeling.

Silence has direct consequences for collaboration. Anyone who covers up a bad day risks being perceived as grumpy or lazy if the workload is not right. If the same person instead openly says that today is a bad day and that they will work normally again tomorrow, the team will know where they stand. Then they can treat each other more considerately.

How to start talking about your mental health

How you start depends on what stage you’re at. Sophie distinguishes between the initial suspicion and the later everyday life with the topic.

When you first suspect that there might be more to your sadness, the first step is always to talk. No matter with whom.

• With a loved one from your personal environment.
• With a hotline if there is no one you want to confide in.
• With a professional, i.e. therapeutic help.

No sense of shame should stop you from seeking help.

If you are already more stable but still unsure how to talk about it in everyday life, a simple search strategy can help: there are like-minded people everywhere and people who understand. Approach someone who you know deals openly with a taboo subject themselves. In Sophie’s experience, such people are almost always willing to listen.

The head-through-the-wall approach of disclosing everything at once is not right for everyone. Most people approach it more cautiously, and that’s completely fine.

A team culture in which therapy is not taboo

Openness changes the culture of a team in the long term, and noticeably so. Sophie observes deeper conversations and a closer connection among her closest colleagues.

Some things have even become a running joke. In her talk, she describes how liberating it is to be able to simply say that you’re going to therapy in the office instead of making up an excuse every time. A colleague adopted her formulation and now announces his own therapy sessions in the same tone. Camouflage became normality.

That’s the real benefit: when mental health is a legitimate topic of conversation, people treat each other with more respect. They bring someone something from the kitchen, they show consideration on a difficult day, they don’t prematurely interpret behavior as a character flaw. This doesn’t make teams softer, but more reliable.