Trigger warning: This podcast episode and article discuss suicide and alcoholism
Speaking on the Diversity and Inclusivity Finance Forum (DIFF) podcast episode about anxiety and mental health in general, Jo Pocklington, director of strategic growth at Alexander Hall Associates, described mental health as how well your mind is doing, adding: “If you think about your physical health being about how your body works, for me, mental health is about how your inner world works,” such as one’s thoughts, feelings and ability to cope with life.
Carrie Carlisle, author, agreed, adding that she used to believe mental health was about how she felt, then how she thinks, but now believes it is a combination of both, as well as the lens she sees the world through and how she interprets things – “if it’s off, then everything else needs recalibrating too”.
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Managing and masking
Responding to when she first became aware of how prevalent mental health challenges were becoming, Pocklington said people had always struggled, but it was not spoken about because of the stigma and the bigger focus on physical health. However, she said it was now more acceptable to discuss things like anxiety.
Carlisle described anxiety as a “car alarm that’s been going on for so long you can’t even hear it anymore… and sometimes it goes off so when it comes back on again you’re like, ‘oh okay, there it is’,” adding that she had always been highly strung, but her anxiety would have to be really elevated for her to take notice of it.
“It’s always there like a personality trait now,” Carlisle added.
When asked about times that their mental wellbeing had affected their lives or work, Pocklington said she was currently going through perimenopause and experiencing things she had not before, like anxiety.
She said she was “fairly lucky” that it had not impacted her work, but in her personal life, it caused her to doubt things more than usual.
“When it creeps up on you, it’s an odd feeling,” Pocklington added.
Carlisle said she had always been anxious, but then dealt with alcoholism, worsening the situation as alcoholism “rinses all the B12 out of your body… and that creates a physical state of anxiety”.
“I was drinking to cover the panic attacks that my body was creating, which was a really exhausting thing to do,” she added.
Carlisle said she was already dealing with an unmanageable level of anxiety, and anything below that was a “bonus” as she was constantly masking.
She said it was not until her husband attempted suicide while she was six months pregnant that Carlisle went from “chronic anxiety to another level”.
Carlisle added: “I got promoted, in the anxiety state, to a Premier League anxiety, which is hypervigilance.”
When her husband returned home from the psychiatric hospital following his suicide attempt, she watched him constantly and stayed awake for days, with the belief she could stop him from harming himself again.
Her husband noticed her worsening condition and took her to the doctor. Carlisle said: “That blew my mind because ‘hello, you’re not the poster boy for mental health right now mate… and now you’re telling me that I’m not well’. It didn’t make sense to me because I knew I wasn’t mentally ill.”
The doctor then told her that her brain chemistry had altered because of life events and gave her a plan to get better.
Real communication and understanding
Pocklington said while she understood the need for them, she did not like buzzwords such as ‘stigma’ and ‘lived experiences’, because “sometimes we use words as bricks to build up walls between people”, adding that stigma simply described people’s fear.
She also said there needed to be more recognition of generational trauma, as people of her mother’s age [70] would have been sent to asylums for conditions like menopause.
“The last asylum was closed in Great Britain until 1995. This is a generational preservation behaviour of people saying, ‘when these people did get back from these asylums’ – for ridiculous things like post-natal depression or menopausal symptoms or psychotic behaviours, something we can deal with in-house now – they coped with it by saying, ‘don’t ever tell anyone where they’ve been’,” she added.
Pocklington said this would have made it “terrifying” for people who were currently of retirement age to be so open with their mental health challenges in today’s world. Additionally, their parents would have been raised in wartime, so the likelihood of dealing with PTSD was higher.
She added: “When you think about it, sometimes [attitudes to mental health] will be moving too fast for some people and we’ve got to meet people where they are, otherwise we just can’t hear each other.”
Host Jack Wride, senior conference producer at Mortgage Solutions, said there were generational differences, as the older generation would have been used to keeping things private, while younger people were more accustomed to hearing other people’s stories and being open.
Listen to the rest of the podcast, where the guests discuss whether the stigma around mental health still exists, what actions still need to be taken, strategies to cope with mental health at work and avoiding feeling overwhelmed.
