Life in the fast lane: mental health day '17

10 October is World Mental Health day, and this year's theme is 'Mental Health in the Workplace'.

As a diplomat, my role is representational: I have to show the best of my country, through the best of me. My job requires of me to exert my brain continually, processing information, making decisions, making conversation, analysing outcomes, outputting documents and juggling multiple things at the same time. Not to mention prepare for a departure, away from my country, family and comfort zone, to some far-off country for the next 3 years.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend told me 'you've been through things in year that most of us hope we don't go through in our lifetimes'. It was an extended annus horribilis, as I call it. Wading from my father's untimely death to an unexpected separation, with various challenges at multiple levels and experimentation with medication made me realise that I was in a poor shape.

I was going through the motion of life. Waking up with a dread and inertia: a dread of the drudgery of life; going through the day with an increasing amount of panic because I couldn't focus and wanted to break down in tears at every moment; disrupted sleeping patterns; gradually losing joy in anything; feeling endlessly critical of myself; perceiving life as if it was happening to me rather than being the one living it...while life went by relentlessly. There were still deadlines to be met. Stakeholders to be managed. Salaries to be earned.

The theme of World Mental Health day couldn't be more appropriate, because in my profession, like so many others, it is taboo to acknowledge that you have a mental illness. The premium on perfection is so high; the reputational costs of acknowledging a mental illness even more so, and the price to pay for mistakes that are made is hellish. I'm willing to bet that every other person I meet in the corridor has some history or the other of mental illness.

Yet, the fact that everyone just seems to 'go on' makes it difficult for us to connect meaningfully with each other over mental illness. Seeing other people 'go on' made me feel that (a) either I'm weak or (b) this mental health thing is made up. Lose-lose much.

But this is the kind of self-imposed isolation that has cast a spell of silence upon the possibility of creating more compassionate workplaces.

Living life in the fast lane while carrying the heaviness of your mental illness requires superhuman effort.

That's why, from my point of view, I feel our workplaces should be designed to be kinder, and we can all play a role in doing that. The first step is simply checking our assumptions and information about mental health. The second is to check your prejudices about mental health. View it as an illness like any other. Understand that people don't choose to have a mental health issue. Be open to talk about it.

Organisations should also stop treating people as mere cogs in a machinery; nothing devalues a person more than the sense that they are but units in a system. The biggest change we can do now, as leaders at any level, is to do our best to remind each other of the value we bring to the organisation.

Everyone matters. YOU matter.