Mental distress is not your fault

By Risto Sarvas, Programme Director, Information Networks, Aalto University

For a long while, I thought that I am no expert in wellbeing, let alone a professional. I have after all no training or education in healthcare, and my current position is that of a programme director.

I was totally wrong. And if you have any decision-making powers at all in your work, you may be too.

The wellbeing of students and employees is often seen as something separate from the work itself. The university is a place for working or studying, and other organisations are responsible for health or wellbeing. The same applies to many other organisations: there is the job itself and the services that support it – for example the occupational health care services.

While there is a reason for this division, it feeds into the idea that we (non-health) professionals who do the ‘real work’ in our own fields are not experts in wellbeing or health. In other words, there is a tendency to think that decision-makers at the university lack the competence to make decisions on wellbeing issues.

Remote studying and work during the pandemic showed that, in a university context, wellbeing is often discussed only after someone no longer feels well. I am sure that we were right to make more appointments available for occupational counsellors and to help students who faced mental health challenges. What I wonder is whether the decision to add support for wellbeing rather than change the way we study and work was based on the division between ‘real work’ and support services. 

Mental distress is not a virus to be fought with medicine. Often, the root causes of mental distress are the organisational structures, bad communications and the leadership culture. On the flip side, wellbeing can be generated through these very same things. The most significant factors for wellbeing are organisational structures, communication, decision-making mechanisms, as well as the work culture stemming from all of these.

I dare say that most of the mental distress brought on by remote work and study was caused by structural shortcomings which had existed even before the pandemic but were accentuated and amplified by it.

My core expertise lies in planning in management and organisations. In addition to that, my day job is that of a programme director at Aalto. Based on this competence and my experience, I will now give three examples of structural factors contributing to wellbeing or aggravating the lack of it.

Excessive focus on performance. Compressing a student’s learning into a single grade reinforces the idea of learning as a quantifiable individual performance and academic success as merely a question of high grades. Such a cynical worldview deprives studying and work of any meaning. It lessens motivation and encourages the wrong kind of optimisation. Ceremonial speeches about diverse learning and enriching study experiences do not help if, in reality, the student’s possibilities of getting scholarships, financial aid, summer jobs and exchange opportunities are all structurally tied to grades and credits. Any amount of meditation or physical exercise is not going to change that. How can we get rid of structures supporting an excessive focus on performance?

Information systems. We live in a world where you can converse with artificial intelligence, get food delivered on your doorstep almost by power of the mind, and book an apartment with a jacuzzi in Tokyo on a few days’ notice. Services like this set the bar for the information systems in our own organisation. We want our systems to be able to adapt near-seamlessly to our needs, and we expect them to help us attain our goals with less effort. 

From an organisation’s viewpoint, its information systems are the tangible structural representation of the organisation’s day-to-day work and core processes. For instance, at a university, the systems essentially tell you what, when and how you can study. At their worst, information systems force us to make choices we do not want to make, add to our mental strain and eat away at our trust in the organisation as a whole. At their best, they are almost invisible tools and automations that help us achieve goals. Information systems are a central structure contributing to the well-being of the organisation, and no occupational or student health care provider can do anything to remedy any issues caused by them. How can we develop information systems into structures that support well-being?

Interaction. The way organisations make decisions and how these decisions are communicated is often the main source of wellbeing. How matters like grades or information systems are communicated can be decisive in how things develop. Do we communicate in two directions? Do you believe that your feedback is heard and things will change? Or do decisions simply pop up in the form of official documents made in the name of a distant committee? 

In most cases, you can go a long way in a complex organisation like a university simply by listening, talking about what you know, and taking responsibility for actions that you can control. An appointment with an occupational counsellor does not change the way organisation communicates. How can we create structures that strengthen interactive communication?

As a programme director, I often have to point out to my students that some things are not their fault. We live in an individualistic world where we are burdened by a great freedom of choice and that this brings with them responsibilities both at work and in studies. In this ego-centric world, people tend to blame themselves for their mental distress: ‘This is my own fault because I chose these courses’ (or this work or this kind of life).

This perspective of everything being ‘on me’ is with good intentions reinforced by individual remedies for restoring wellbeing – such as meditation, sleep or exercise. They seem to imply that a lack of sleep or exercise are the problems to be solved, although it is obvious that any amount of these health-related actions will not remove the underlying structural issues. 

Similarly, key skills like reflection, life management or self-leadership most often seem to support the idea that the individual should somehow correct a fault in themselves. Reflecting on an issue, when done right, may help the individual to see that there are some things they cannot change. But reflecting on an issue from too narrow a perspective may lead to self-accusations, although the root cause lies elsewhere. 

All organisations have structural issues that are not the individual’s fault. For instance, in a university setting, the student cannot assume responsibility for an excessively performance-oriented culture, for information systems, for the lack of organisational resources, communication, unclear division of responsibilities, or any other structural issues. These problems and challenges are the responsibility of the leaders, managers, supervisors and other people who make decisions.

This means that any person who can influence work, performance indicators, information systems, communication, projects, processes, recruitment, career development, group dynamics, community building, visions, resources etc. has a critical role to play in the wellbeing of the community. Such people are experts in wellbeing and they have a great deal of competence and power over increasing it.

Boosting wellbeing in an organisation does not mean simply to apply more bandages when new wounds appear. I have great respect for the professionals in healthcare and wellbeing. However, when the source of mental distress is structural, there is nothing even an army of occupational counsellors, physicians, therapists or nurses can do to fix it. The foundation for wellbeing lies in the structures and the management culture of the organisation. These can only be changed by the people with power and responsibility in the organisation. Because, whether they like the idea or not, they are the organisation’s experts in wellbeing.