Personal Blogs

All posts with the image of four beings (image left) are on 'Mental Health and Mental Health Advocacy at Work'.

All posts with this image are about creative study suggestions - they are not intended to be advice

Continuing with my answers to a level 3 certificate in 'Mental Health and Mental Health Advocacy in the Workplace; in which I am attempting to answer with a null hypothesis to prove (or not) the positive hypothesis (the statements given to me in the course material). This section is split into a number of segments so is a series of answers to one main question.

Describe ways to support an individual with mental ill health for each of the areas identified.

Mental health decline and early intervention:

Let us start with SmartPhones and ClickBait: Mental health decline attributed to modern digital internet and other social connectivity is still in its nascent state before the individual becomes addicted to dopamine; the release of which is triggered by anticipation. Let us be clear, though, that anticipation is a key feature of the infant-tickling rhyme ‘Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear. One step, two steps, Tickly under there!’. It is good in moderate doses. Just the same as ‘Peekaboo!’. Let us not forget the ‘Jack-in-a-box’ waiting for the ‘Jack’ to leap up, and ‘Buckaroo’ (the only fun in taking turns to load a plastic mule is the anticipation of it bucking everything off – there is no goal or reward). Even ‘Monoploy’ has an anticipation of landing on the ‘Go to Jail’ square when the player gets past ‘Vine Street’.

The rise in incidences of mental decline, though not necessarily widely recognised by mental health clinicians who regularly subscribe to frequent digital phone usage, began when mobile phones first had the capability to send text messages. Then, the sender of a text could initiate an anticipation of a response to their text. More importantly, this was on-demand. The content of the message was practically irrelevant as can be realised by understanding the brevity of those early text messages: –

- Sender A “Where are you?”

- Sender B “At home. Where are you?”

- Sender A “At home. What are you doing?”

A simple telephone call would easily have the capacity to send and receive such drivel, and back then, in the 1990s, would have been much cheaper at 12p per minute against 10p per text. However, there is no anticipation of receiving an unsolicited telephone call and it is the release of dopamine, and its release on demand, that is relevant here. More importantly, the actual conversation comes third in the list of importance to the texter. Second, is the sociability aspect and having someone there to dispel any kind of newly-imagined loneliness.

Click-Bait is such as this: - ‘See how these actors from the 1980s look like now’ There then follows a series of pictures (probably 20 or so) that creates anticipation for the next revelation of an actor’s ugly transmogrification into a hideous old monster. Apparently, the fun wears thin before the last picture is viewed.

We all know, yet really do not want to recognise fully that we are all becoming less intelligent while we rely more and more on digital technology; we allow simple decisions to be taken from us because we cannot be bothered to apply ourselves to discovery. The canker has begun, yet there may still be time to intervene. Whether this will later be considered to be an early intervention depends on the time-frame it takes to eliminate this addiction to on-demand dopamine. There is always a temporal facet to everything. Many people will argue that digital technology helps them with complicated tasks and increases sociability for isolated people. Yet, in the modern Global North, isolation is now considered to be: having no battery power for our phones, and tends to ignore the remoteness of open countryside or elderly people with no analogue connectivity, such as visitors.

To be fair, it was the innovation (now disruption – in that it has replaced and not enhanced anything) of the home PC and video games played at home that reduced the social interaction of many young people. Digital communication, presently through gaming platforms, has somewhat re-established social interaction for those people; with the rest of the Global North also regarding their phone bill as being more important than food and heating. Where the individual is, in the ubiquitous chain of mental health decline, will always remain unclear until the individual is debriefed in their entirety.

From The Guardian 14^th October 2018 -

‘We have known for a long time that repeated interruptions affect concentration. In 2005, research carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that persistent interruptions and distractions at work had a profound effect. Those distracted by emails and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, twice that found in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana. More than half of the 1,100 participants said they always responded to an email immediately or as soon as possible, while 21% admitted they would interrupt a meeting to do so. Constant interruptions can have the same effect as the loss of a night’s sleep.’

from The lost art of concentration – The Guardian Sunday 14 Oct 2018

accessed: some time in 2022.

same link below

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/oct/14/the-lost-art-of-concentration-being-distracted-in-a-digital-world

One could utilise Hampden-Turner and Trompenaars framework to reconcile dilemmas in order to glean some idea of how to be most useful in offering support to an individual with mental ill health at the mental decline and early intervention stage. 

There are six steps:

1 Identify the dilemma - Gather information from multiple sources to get a deeper understanding, by recognising the dilemmas.

2 Chart the dilemma - Make the dilemma specific (what is it about and who is the holder?) and crack the line to invite people to combine the opposite.

3 Stretch the dilemma - Stretch the dilemma by making it bigger and bolder.

4 Make epithets - Emphasise the negatives of the extremes to invite people not to be there.

5 Reconcile the dilemma - How can value X help you get more of value Y?

6 Action planning - Define action points to make it real.

A little too strong. Perhaps?

Sadly, the idea of there being early intervention in the decline of mental health for an individual is the same as a sailing ship on a lee shore. Only Neptune can drag the ship to deeper waters, or God change the direction of the wind. In both rescue attempts there is a recognisance that monumentous intervention is required; free-will is over-ridden. There is, however, a more earthly solution, if the ship is not lost beforehand: in meteorology, when there is low pressure the wind will rotate in an anti-clockwise motion, and in a high pressure environment the wind will rotate in a clockwise fashion; so, depending on where the ship is, (no good if it is central to the environmental conditions), simply waiting for the environment to change may actually be a good solution – take a rest.

Today, we have dopamine addicts who may further decline into mental ill-health, while they are in a work environment. Any help that is given must surely include weaving in some form of anticipation. How odd! Or, the employers need to have anticipation as part of their employees work load. Perhaps another form of positive reinforcement needs to be introduced. ‘Good Job!’ ‘Way to go, Bob!’, and ‘Yee hah!’; but make them wait for it.

In an ideal world, managers, and senior personnel would have a good insight into the employees, pupils, and underlings’ personal lives and how this affects their work capacity. Equally, these people would have the time and motivation to enquire (or eavesdrop in the toilet cubicle) into how employees are coping with their work load and function. In this way, these key persons can be aware of any changes in mood and, in a perfect world, make a deductive decision as to the mental health of the individual, or the decline of the mental health of the individual. In reality, the average person would flail about and come up with an inductive guess, from the compilation of collected information and a conclusion drawn up from that.

At the early intervention stage there should be a reassurance of there being someone to talk to about stress, resentment, anger, and anything else that is currently disturbing the employee, that pertains to the work and work environment, such as worker relationships, and behaviours. This, however, is merely good business practice as it pays to keep the experienced work-force happy. (This, then, is when I finally get to understand the term ‘bi-conceptual’). Help is making someone feel better AND making sure the business doesn’t lose money through poor worker ethics. Wrapped up in this verbal and non-verbal communication is a necessity to monitor work-loads to avoid stress. Early intervention might include informal de-briefs in a casual, not at all covert, way – just chatting. Further information on employees’ life outside of the work/learning environment is also useful.

An ironic example: There was a man who bragged that his horse only needed a strand of hay a day to survive. When he was dazedly questioned how he knows this, he said. ‘I fed it half a bale of hay. Then, I halved the amount each day. It died when I only gave it half a strand of hay, but it was alive when it had a whole piece.’

The moral of the story is there should not be any work-related problems that adversely affect the employees, but poorly trained managers with employees that have mental ill-health are like people clumsily putting their fingers on balls of mercury – it won’t stick to them, is toxic, and it will find a route away from force to coalesce elsewhere.