What people carry into work isn't a diagnosis

Grief, money, a childhood nobody chose. Most distress at work starts with what people carry, not something wrong with them. What that means if you manage people.

Most of what I write comes back to one thing: what people carry. Some of it is years old. Some of it happened last Tuesday. It shapes how people feel at work, and a diagnostic checklist misses most of it. Yet we keep treating it as if it were a fault in the person.

I wrote recently on LinkedIn about the claim that nine in ten people who die by suicide had a mental health condition, and where that number comes from. The comments under it made the point better than I did. People wrote about grief. About adoption, and forced adoption. About addiction. About money. About domestic abuse.

Hardly anyone wrote about a condition. They wrote about what happened to them.

I’m in this too

I don’t write about this from a distance. I’ve carried a lot, from childhood onwards, and some of it I still carry. I’m a suicide survivor. I’m not going to list the rest here, because it’s not about me.

What I will say is that most of it was something that happened to me, not something wrong with me. It took me a long time to see it that way.

What people bring through the door

Think about the people you work with this week. Someone is grieving and back at work after the standard few days. Someone is behind on the rent. Someone did a caring shift before they logged on and will do another tonight, and nobody pays them for that one. Someone’s childhood still shows up every time a manager raises their voice.

None of that is on a sick note. All of it comes to work.

And some of it nobody gets through life without. I can’t think of anyone who won’t lose someone they love. So this isn’t about a fragile few. At some point it’s every one of us, and we’ll still be expected at work.

When the CDC in America went through the records of suicide deaths in 27 states in 2015, over half of the people who had died had no known mental health condition. What the records did show was relationship problems, money trouble, losing a home, a crisis that had just happened or was about to. That’s not a list of illnesses. It’s a list of things that happen to people.

Why a label is the easy answer

A diagnosis puts the problem inside the person. It’s something they have, so it’s something they get treated for, and everything around them can carry on as it was.

Some people find a diagnosis helps, and that’s theirs to decide. But at work, a label too often ends the conversation. The question stops being “what happened?” and becomes “what’s wrong with you?”. Then the answer is an app or a resilience course, and the person is asked to adapt while the workload and the rent stay exactly the same.

It also lets us off the hook. If distress is an illness, it isn’t about how we run the place. We can count the sickness absence and stop asking why.

If you manage people

You don’t need to know anyone’s story. They may never tell you, and they don’t owe you it.

What you can do is notice. Notice when someone who was chatty goes quiet. Notice the late emails, the missed lunches, the snapping. And when you notice, ask, and ask like you mean it. “You don’t seem yourself, is there anything going on?” is enough to start.

Then look at what work is adding. The deadline that could move. The rota that could change. The meeting that’s making someone dread Monday. You can’t take away what someone carries in. You can stop adding to it. Agree what will change, and check back to see if it’s helped.

It’s what I say to every group I train: you’ve just finished a course, but you haven’t changed your working practices yet. Noticing is where that starts.

Everyone you work with is carrying something. The question for a workplace isn’t what’s wrong with them. It’s what happened to them, and whether work is making it heavier.

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