By Louise Deacon, GoodYarn
Understanding how Mental Health Literacy fits into organisational mental health and wellbeing plans.
Mental health literacy (MHL) programs such as GoodYarn, an award-winning workplace program, are important components of a comprehensive and integrated workplace mental health and wellbeing strategy.
What is MHL?
MHL is widely accepted to refer to ‘knowledge and beliefs about mental disorders that aid their recognition, management or prevention’. In this sense, many workplace efforts to improve mental health literacy have a sole focus on building various capacities within individuals, teams and organisations to respond to mental ill-health. However, the importance of fostering knowledge and skills that promote and protect positive mental health and wellbeing is being recognised as key to MHL, as well. In this sense, positive MHL attends to the individual, and collective knowledge and actions required to obtain and maintain good mental health. A holistic MHL program should therefore cover both these dimensions of mental health and wellbeing.
Organisational approaches to mental health and wellbeing
An integrated and comprehensive organisational mental health and wellbeing strategy should address worker mental health from a number of perspectives. First, it should aim to prevent harm by eliminating or reducing job-related risks that are associated with mental health problems. This is achieved through the assessment and management of risks, and good work design.
Second, it should aim to promote, create, and enhance wellbeing and positive mental health by developing the positive aspects of work, as well as developing the individual strengths and capacities of workers. Third, it should respond to workers experiencing distress, poor mental health, or mental illness – regardless of cause – aiming to intervene early to prevent a person from becoming more unwell and to support their recovery.
This general way of thinking about mental health is common across many public and occupational health models providing comprehensive and holistic approaches to health and wellbeing. Therefore, depending on the field of occupational or public health that the models are drawn from, you may see this type of staged conceptual framework described in various ways, which are roughly similar. For example, since the 1960s, prevention-focused models have talked about ‘primary, secondary and tertiary’ prevention, or ‘preventative, ameliorative and reactive’ strategies, interventions, or responses.
Where do MHL programs sit within this framework?
Because MHL programs have traditionally focused solely on intervening at signs of distress or ill-health, they have commonly been considered most relevant to tertiary or reactive strategies. Indeed, there is robust evidence showing that improved MHL is associated with improved help-seeking intentions for those experiencing mental health problems, improved attitudes towards people living with mental health problems, improved attitudes toward mental health treatment or therapies, and increased confidence to aid and support those experiencing mental distress.
The fact that these are all very important outcomes in the context of work cannot be understated; however, this singular focus disregards the idea that positive or optimal mental health is not simply synonymous with the absence of mental ill-health.
MHL programs that incorporate positivemental health – such as including an understanding of protective individual and social determinants of health, and the things that individuals, teams, and organisation can do to intervene before people become unwell, and that promote good mental health and wellbeing – open up a space in which broader concepts beyond simply responding to ill-health or harm might be considered. Thus, positive MHL also has relevance to secondary interventions.
Finally, research has suggested that in improving general knowledge, skills and confidence to talk about mental health, organisation-wide improvements in MHL may also encourage and enable organisations’ interest in, and commitment to, other aspects of a comprehensive model, such as primary interventions, in the longer term. In this way, MHL programs may provide the groundwork required for organisations to build a more comprehensive and integrated mental health and wellbeing program within their workplace.
About GoodYarn
GoodYarn is an established, award-winning, and evidenced‑based MHL program for workplaces that was initially developed for the rural sectorn in Otago and Southland, in 2014. Since its inception, it has grown to become a nationwide workplace mental health program, straddling a broad range of industries, business types and sizes. The flexibility in the delivery model has enabled its implementation by listed companies, large farming cooperatives and government agencies, right down to small and medium-sized businesses.
GoodYarn takes a holistic perspective on developing MHL, covering both the skills and knowledge required to respond to poor mental health, as well as the things we can do to maintain and promote good mental health on a day-to-day basis as individuals, groups, and workplaces. It provides a practical starting point for businesses and organisations wanting to address mental health and wellbeing, as well as forming a fundamental cornerstone of many organisations’ established, comprehensive health and wellbeing strategies.
Drawing on the colloquial notion of a ‘yarn’ being an informal conversation, the naming of the program, GoodYarn: Oranga Kōrero, points to the normalisation and destigmatisation of practical conversations about mental health and wellbeing, and refers not only to having conversations about health, but also that health is promoted and supported when we talk to one another.
GoodYarn has a unique delivery model. Business owners nominate people within their organisation who have the right skills and attributes to become GoodYarn facilitators. Facilitators are trained up over an intensive two-day workshop and, upon their organisation being licensed, facilitators are provided with all the necessary resources to commence program delivery within their workplace.
By training facilitators within the workplace, who, in turn, deliver GoodYarn to their peers and colleagues, the model creates exponential benefit to those organisations, their clients and customers. In the process, employers have a product that can easily be embedded into business‑as‑usual practices, and employees are firmly in the driving seat for creating the workplace culture they want to be part of.