Strengthen workplace mental wellness, collaboration and productivity; and is diagnosis an enabler?
Two news items this morning that are strongly connected to me and the internal work at Beyond Green:
- Wes Streeting orders review of mental health diagnoses as benefit claims soar
- Sir Charlie Mayfield’s prime time interview on Radio 4 (8:10 – 8:20) about disability and mental health in the workplace
My personal reflections below bring together the two strands of these articles: i) the presumption that the rise in mental health and disability benefits is driven by overdiagnosis (my personal story), and ii) businesses need to work with the real people around the table (how we work at Beyond Green).
Diagnosis- A necessary enabler?
The overdiagnosis narrative is deeply worrying for someone who struggled in school, university and professional qualifications with undiagnosed dyslexia until I was 34. From clearing out my family home after my father passed away this year, I came across my old school reports, and a consistent theme was very good effort but “careless mistakes”. This continued at university, with earlier feedback on my essays as good points/insight, but let down by sub-standard writing. This began to sow seeds of anxiety and not being good enough, regardless of how hard I worked.
Struggles and Survival Strategies
Like many people with neurodivergent minds, there is a determination to develop survival strategies to overcome our struggles and the associated anxieties. For me, personalised strategies in a world with limited support and many barriers enabled me to progress through university and embark on an accountancy qualification with the ICAEW. Though in the late 1990s, the world of numbers was moving toward report writing and the digestion of a lot of written information. Despite passing 12 exams, the Final Admitting Exam (FAE) – a case study – was, in my view, the F****** Awkward Exam, as it took me several attempts before I passed. With 10s of practice papers, four exams over two additional years, I realised something after my diagnosis. The jo-jo marks I received correlated with the volume and density of written information in the exam. With no diagnosis, a life of strategies means you just get on with it and do your best; there was no additional time, support, or curiosity about why this employee was struggling with the FAE, despite being highly rated in performance reviews.
The invisible hand of technology
In the workplace, the firm Price Waterhouse (PW) ‘s vision to digitise audit work within the first year of my training enabled me to adapt how I process information, document my work, and use my dyslexic dexterity to connect disconnected information to gain insights. However, the struggle continued as promotion shifted the focus of work further away from numbers and closer to report writing, email communication, etc. The promotions also enabled my abilities to understand a range of points in a room and to build authentic relationships to flourish. A childhood strategy to avoid writing at all costs enabled me to develop skills in building trust through better listening and communication. As the saying goes, people will remember how you made them feel above all.
Needs Key players on the pitch
So was this diagnosis an enabler as I moved through my career? In short, yes, it was, though it took 15 years to feel it! For non-disabled people, an enabler could be a mentor or a network that opens doors. BUT it needs other players on the pitch to really transform the working lives of neurodivergent people and others, the value we bring to the organisations they invest a huge proportion of their time in, and the broader economy and society.
Read Paul’s thoughts on how businesses can make a difference in part 2 of the blog post.