Happy World Mental Health Day! Your brands' social media posts did not go unnoticed
It's World Mental Health Day: Another day to reduce and commodify real issues faced by real people to just another day on the social media content calendar to schedule a virtuous post about.
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This World Mental Health Day 2024 I'm cutting my day short to write this post, and if you're seeing this I hope you're actually reading this and consider this your call to action to do more than exploit real-world-issues for your (personal) brand/image.
TL;DR: Real people's real-life challenges are not your brand's commodities to exploit, especially when your day-to-day environment and operations are hostile to those very people with the challenges you seek to exploit for clout.
My experiences relayed below may not match your own those of your nearest or dearest. Please let’s not seek to invalidate anyone else’s lived experience.
It’s Thursday. Don’t expect my Sunday best.
Having just lost my job I find myself in serious need of paid work and genuinely wanting to embrace the ✨positive vibes only✨ happy-clappiness of LinkedIn in all its toxicity and across all online platforms where I have a profile—posting good and nice things only, to show myself in the best possible light like a perfect human being that everyone wants to hire and be friends with... but I can't. I am aware that posts like this one will not help me in life. I know that the criticism and negativity I post will stick to me more than to anyone I seek to call in, thus reducing my chances of paid work, but I cannot sit idly by. (I hold no illusions over my limited reach but if I keep my mouth shut or my touch-typing fingers still, I’ll just be another GenX’er quietly complacent in everything everywhere sucking for everyone but a few.)
If you don't have the space or desire to lay foot paths or cycling paths, you can tell people who don't drive to not use a specific road, or you can improve the safety of said road. If you have no power or ability to change road quality or layout, you can still help make it safer by becoming a better fellow user. Or… you can tell people who say it’s unsafe to stop using it.
It’s 2024. You cannot dismiss people calling out harmful social media content (or legacy media output!) with “Just ignore them! Stop using them!” when, whether we like it or not, they’ve become an integral part of every-day life.
It's Thursday 10 October 2024. It’s World Mental Health Day and almost all I see online – especially on platforms like LinkedIn – is another popular social-media-content-calendar day for scheduled posts featuring vapid virtue signals to make brands look committed to the cause du jour. One post1 I saw even used language that in this day and age may be perceived as ableist2.
Few brands’ #WorldMentalHealthDay social media posts I saw today spoke about actual work being done to solidify the commitment. Even the official organisation’s website appears to say that its only commitment is… the day itself?
Some brands’ social media posts do speak about supposed work they’re doing, but those seem to be about money poured into initiatives as far removed from their own day-to-day businesses as possible. I don’t want to disparage that, it’s good businesses are giving money to mental health charities and those charities are doing good things with that money, but if the donated money is paid out of profit owed to the hard work of employees dealing with work conditions that adversely affect their mental health and pay that denies them access to quality resources… how much good is being done, exactly?
Even when organisations supposedly do things for their own people they often seem by way of outsourcing responsibilities: Buying into employee wellness benefits that are proven to rarely work3 or offering Employee Assistance Programmes (EAPs), all of which linked to one’s employment (meaning workers may have to stay in work environments that may well cause or contribute to their need for assistance). It’s almost as if organisations will do anything except invest in improving working conditions and providing pay that might enable employees to access quality mental health care safely separated from their workplaces.4
Meanwhile organisations deploy carefully crafted messaging of how they want their brand to be seen (and probably genuinely want their organisations to be) as cool, committed, and considerate, in ways that might be ignoring or even deflecting how they’re potentially only making their own workplaces worse and less inclusive to people with disabilities, health conditions, neurodivergencies. (I'll leave discussing the numbers games being played to claim cultural and socioeconomic diversity for another time).
Throughout my career I've spent a lot of time in countless different work environments and I cannot escape the impression that at least London's jobs climate has only become more homogenous, less inclusive, less diverse, less accessible and more ableist than it was 15-20 years ago.
Processes that could and should have made workplaces better were broken down into procedures and checklists that could and should have helped organisations improve. Instead they ended up serving to effectively exclude everything and everyone not fitting into an organisation by way of the only checkboxes considered.
Offices were made "accessible" by ripping out doorsills and putting in ramps while lack of true diversity among decision-makers meant no one even considered whether every single employee would be able to open those super-heavy, floor-to-ceiling, bespoke-design doors unaided, whether the acoustics of sleek office design wouldn’t create aural discomfort for some, if those sleek uniform one-size-fits-all design office chairs would indeed be comfortable for every body type for eight hours or if those rugged wooden floors in the warehouse conversion would work for every walking aid.
Office walls were ripped out or new office blocks built to create “open, collaborative” spaces for everyone except the decision-makers who kept their separate private spaces, and no one bothered to wonder if those great open-plan spaces would benefit every employee.
Those who relished post-lockdown returns to the office declared themselves the default/standard and started pushing on everyone returning, even the ones who had thrived under alternative working arrangements.5
My own experience is London-centric (sorry!), where 2024 workplaces tend to feature more communal spaces and events, which is great, but also offers fewer opt-outs from them for those who need the occasional breaks away from the continual overstimulation of each and every work and leisure space or activity being a shared one. Inclusivity gets misinterpreted as “everything, everywhere, shared”: no space to be alone, or restricted in use (claustrophobic, limited time slots, bookable in advance); lunch together is social and favoured and fun, but the colleague who needs a moment to decompress from the sensory overload of all this social togetherness to sit somewhere alone to eat their sandwich will likely be judged for doing so.6
London’s 2024 workplace flexibility is a mere re-appropriation of language and marketing7—”flexible working hours” meaning not everyone starts and finishes work at the same time, but seemingly fewer London office jobs now offer such working times that one can truly escape rush-hour commutes entirely8; terms like “remote working” or “hybrid working” now more than before being used to simply deny someone their own assigned desk in an office, while expecting regular in-person office attendance.
The brand marketing game has become so strong that every organisation wants to project a perfectly curated image of great employership by way of design and language, but then reverse-applies this by judiciously controlling all conditions and by seeking out only those new hires most likely to already fit in with the curated image, rather than adjusting environments and operations to accommodate a greater diversity of people (especially throughout the entire organisation and not just in the lower echelons).
For me, as someone who works mostly as a contractor or freelancer, it has been disheartening to return to previous workplaces year after year and only see the diversity of people there diminish with each web page, press release, social media post, commercial, advert et cetera that brand or organisation puts out about supposed commitments to people and causes.
As someone with physical and mental health challenges, I feel progressively alienated in day-to-day life and work as places and spaces increasingly project diversity, inclusion, accessibility et cetera but decreasingly facilitate them.
Disclaimer: I know I am not the default, and I know my personal experience may not represent the status quo.
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See also:
See https://bsky.app/profile/jojowiththeflow.bsky.social/post/3l6646ldcvm2y for a screenshot but please be aware it contains language that some might consider ableist. I have not linked the originator’s post because I do not wish to instigate social media pile-ons.
Why People Are Rethinking The Words 'Crazy' and 'Insane' - NPR, 08 July 2019, accessed 10 October 2024. https://www.npr.org/2019/07/08/739643765/why-people-are-arguing-to-stop-using-the-words-crazy-and-insane
Why most workplace wellness benefits don’t actually work, Fast Company, 27 March 2024, accessed 10 October 2024. https://www.fastcompany.com/91068943/why-most-workplace-wellness-benefits-dont-actually-work
UK's biggest provider of workplace mental health services let corporate clients listen in to confidential helpline calls without the knowledge or permission of callers, BBC, 12 July 2024, accessed 10 October 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxee3glz2pyo
Obligatory acknowledgement that not all jobs can be done remotely but some jobs can and do not need to be subjected to false fairness arguments to excuse or justified mandatory RTO directives.
The swanky meditation room with expensive indoor water feature, massage chair, sound system, visual projections and incense the business spent a fortune on is great for momentary seclusion. But for some also an overstimulation nightmare in terms of potential sensory overload.
Please do not base your impression of any job market on the job adverts you see, since too many advertised vacancies nowadays are duplicate/triplicates/quadruplicate/etc postings, ghost jobs not actually reflecting open positions, or outright fakes aimed at garnering the maximum amounts of applications for data harvesting, AI training or other scraping purposes.
This benefited both employees and employers: Employers got a greater pick of workers because things like cost or unavailability of childcare did not disable top performers from staying with the company because they would be able work around those private commitments. Employees could optimise their working times to suit the territories and time zones they worked with. Each single desk space could be assigned to at least two employees working separate shifts, with time in between for cleaning. I could go on…