I suppose I should be pleased to see the hashtag #ItsOkNotToBeOk. It’s well meaning, for starters. It says that it’s okay to admit you are struggling with mental health issues. As sentiments go, it’s right up there. But what if the rest of the world doesn’t care?
The rest of the world is beginning to catch up, albeit slowly, and I am going to give another outing to my whinge about the British Red Cross (BRC) for whom I happily worked for a year or so until they made my life hell for a year. Let me tell you a story.
When I applied to join the BRC, I gave full disclosure on my CV about my background of mental health problems. At my interview, I emphasised what I had written in my CV about my mental health problems. I added that my illness would not affect my job if I was helped to stay on the beaten track. For a year, it went blissfully well. Until the manager changed.
Bearing in my mind I had been in full time work for 39 years, it came as a shock to be bullied and abused at a world renowned humanitarian organisation. As a result, I had a full-on breakdown. And just when I think I am getting over the trauma, I realise I am not. I’ve discussed it during my latest therapy sessions and, it is fair to say, my therapist was shocked by the way I was treated, almost as shocked as I was. The BRC broke me. They destroyed my confidence, they drove me to despair. Then, when I was at my lowest ebb, I was referred to occupational health.
I had expected the occupational health officer of the British Red Cross to treat me with sympathy and compassion. Instead, she was as cold as a fish and utterly without empathy. It was a horrible experience, especially since I was still very ill. The officer described me in her report as “emotionally weak”. That was so upsetting given what I had been through. To make it through a working life when sometimes I was having to pick myself up off the floor, sometimes literally, showed to me I was actually the world’s strongest man, or a survivor at least. They sure know how to hurt a man.
When I left the BRC, I wrote to the CEO who, at first, did not respond, but when he finally did, he got a friend of my abusers to write an ‘independent’ report on the bullying and abuse I was subject to. Her conclusion, accepted by the CEO, was that no bullying or abuse ever happened. I must have made it all up. He was sorry how I felt, but he wasn’t sorry about the behaviour of some of his staff. I loved my job, but with friends like the British Red Cross, who needs enemies? I had to leave.
I say all of this in relation to the #ItsOkNotToBeOk hashtag. I was not okay when I joined the BRC, but I was in a good place. I really wanted this job, I loved it so much I asked to work an extra day a week and the job was later stolen away from me. It was not okay to be not okay in the BRC. On the contrary, certain staff members made my life hell. I thought I had forgiven them, but how can you forgive people who show no contrition, who do not admit what they know to be true, who are unable to apologise for what they did? I’ll give you some examples of what happened.
My new manager possessed few managerial skills. If I raised my own mental health problems, she simply talked about hers. Although she was difficult to work for, I kept my head down and just got on with it. Then, one day an area manager turned up to tell me I had to “manage the manager” and to try to work with someone I didn’t like. But I didn’t dislike her. A few weeks later, he re-appeared and took me into a room and launched into a lengthy rant which reduced me to tears. Not just a few tears but absolute fully blown blubbing. Over two hours, he took me to pieces and tried to get me to admit I hated the manager. He spoke of his own manager and said “Sometimes I’d like to rip her fucking head off”. He was trying to make me say that was how I felt about my manager, but I didn’t. I was in such a mess, he sent me home. The next morning, I turned up for work having had very little sleep. A colleague asked if I was going out visiting later that day. I could barely speak but managed to whisper, “I don’t know.” My line manager exploded. “What’s that supposed to mean?” And I was off again, a broken man, crying in an office full of women. I was upset and embarrassed.
Later, another manager was brought in for a reconciliation meeting with my line manager. The effects of depression and anxiety had all but broken me by this stage. The senior manager then produced a set of minutes which contained something that I never said. I refused to sign them and was threatened with disciplinary action. And a few weeks later, on my last day in work for nearly a week, my line manager took me into a private office and said I was subject to disciplinary action for “doing down the Red Cross” and then walked out of the room and left the office. Imagine doing something like that to someone who was suffering from severe clinical depression? Now, if a famous international charity can behave like this, what price other companies and organisations being more sympathetic?
My own view, for what it is worth, that it is okay to not be okay depending on who you are dealing with. Under successive managers, I was well cared for in the civil service, particular in the last 20 or so years. I suppose that the civil service, certainly the part in which I worked, was highly professional and had systems in place. A charity by its very nature would not attract high end top quality staff for the money it paid (apart from its senior managers who are very well rewarded, oddly enough).
It should be #ItsOkNotToBeOk but it isn’t everywhere. Not everyone is sympathetic, not everyone gives a damn. I still think it’s best to be open and honest about your mental health, but the consequences are not always what you might want them to be.
