Thursday 11 May 2017

Even working for a branch of Mind¹, is it safe for one's colleagues to know much about one's mental-health issues (let alone brushes with suicide) ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


11 May

Feeling like a burden : in the world of employment, what might follow from others' difficult feelings 'as a result of telling them about your suicidal feelings' ?

The charity SANE (@CharitySANE) no doubt means well by urging such messages on us - as if talking is just talking, and without risks, and a disclosure can be 'unknown' afterwards by those who hear or read it :



Sadly, knowledge always has the potential to be power, and - whether or not they consciously intend to view you, and what they are now aware of about you, as weakness - colleagues can subtly start treating you as other [the writer talks from the perspective of having had this exact experience in employment by an LMA*] :



As if they are different from you, as if they need to wonder about you, what you are doing and The S Question, when you are unavoidably and / or unexpectedly out of sight...



As if, frankly, you have become a liability, irrespective of your previous years of service (when they did not know) !





Being employed by a charity, not even a mental-health charity*, is any protection against the effects of what they now know - and never [let you] forget !






End-notes :

¹ Usually set up as companies limited by guarantee, regional mental-health charities affiliate to Mind (and become Local Mind Associations, or LMAs), and, although they largely 'run their own show', they are allowed to use the Mind name².




² There is, in fact, no such thing as the national Mind charity per se (@MindCharity), and the name 'Mind' (not an acronym, so it should not be rendered MIND) is just a trading-name : The National Association for Mental Health, which is what Mind is really called, just started using it decades ago, and, when it caught on, never looked back.

Question : Nothing is for ever, not even trademarks, or trading-names, so have we reached the point in time when anyone could start using the name Mind... ?







Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

No comments: