Hello kittens! Hope you all enjoyed your weekends and are ready for another dosage of Mental Health Mondays. Last week we talked about what mental breaks are, how they’re helpful in everyday life and important for maintaining mental health, how long a mental break is and what you do during them is suited to the individual, and how mental breaks are not a cure-all but they do help by making stress and burnout easier to manage. This week I wanted to delve more into the topic of mental breaks but instead of exploring how you can apply them to yourselves, I wanted to explore how they’ve been applied to today’s society and how the new discourse on mental breaks has been trying to spark new change in our institutions.

From high school to college and from school to work, we all experience stress and burnout at some level and in certain environments, which is why even some governments, at the state level have recognized this and have implemented mental health days into the school system. According to a New York Times article by Derrick Bryson Taylor, on the 1st of July in 2019, Oregon had it written into their law that five mental health days would be granted to students within a three-month period. The year prior in 2018, Utah changed the definition of a valid excuse by including mental or physical illness. The article goes on to talk about how a recently graduated high school student from Oregon agrees that these new laws and recognition of the seriousness of mental health are important, because “dealing with anxiety throughout high school…” leaves students “tired, exhausted” and “the difference one day makes is honestly life-changing”. Like how I mentioned in my previous blog, if five minutes of having a mental break can be beneficial, imagine how one day for a student trying to manage their course work, personal life, social life, and maybe other extracurricular activities could greatly benefit from having a day’s worth of rest for their mental well-being. When you think of it, mental breaks do not seem like complex science, rather like common sense, but with the stigmatization of mental health, it’s taken this long for it to be even recognized in such a way.

Taylor shares some statistics in his article for the New York Times which really shed some light on the gravity of mental health on today’s youth more than ever. As stated in a 2017 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), suicide is the second leading cause of death for 10 to 34 years old. This shows just how real this issue of mental health is and how early on mental health can become a problem that needs to be addressed with care, support and the utmost respect. Taylor also mentions a 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance report which revealed that during 12 months before the survey, 7.4 percent had attempted suicide. Students deal with a lot of stress from trying to make good grades to the cruelty of bullying and the peer pressures of trying to fit in or be noticed. It does get easier, I would say speaking from my own college experience, because as you grow older, your classmates mature and everyone stops caring as much as they used to but some aspects reach adulthood and seem inescapable. Which is why, we need to create solutions on how to tackle these problems, and I believe mental breaks and healthy, positive mental health discourse are the answers. 

You’re probably familiar with the expression, “Leave your problems at the door”, but not only do high schoolers and college students deal with bringing their personal problems to school and having to manage them while trying to accomplish their course work, but people at their jobs have been dealing with the pressure of balancing their work while maintaining optimal mental health, or in some cases, just good enough mental health to keep on working. This issue is a little more complex because there are a lot of uncontrollable factors in the hierarchy of the workplace. Some people disagree with the advent of implementing mental breaks into the workplace. A Forbes article entitled “The Futility Of Mental Health Days” by Bernie Wong makes a strong argument against mental breaks but I think he also gets to the meat of where the issue lies. Sometimes the issues aren’t coming from mental illness, sometimes it’s environmental and that is something that is not within our control. Sometimes corporate needs to make changes to how things are being run because if you’re just an employee, you only have so much power that you can use to create real change in the workplace. Wong says “Create a culture that supports mental health at work. Mental health days are just the tip of the iceberg. A mentally healthy workplace is not achieved by ticking a box—it’s created and sustained through culture change, which comes from a culmination of strategies like: 

• Regular manager trainings

• Coaching for company leaders

• Mental health employee resource groups (ERGs)

• Mental health as a part of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts”

I think Wong lays out a really great strategy to approach workplace mental health issues and if we just started making the actual steps toward this we could achieve great strides in the mental health community.

Since 1992, October 10th has been recognized as international World Mental Health Day, which was established to create education, advocacy, and awareness of mental health and to end the stigma against it. Our society still has a long way to go and school and work environments are just two out of many institutions that need to be a part of this discussion, but I think we’re headed toward the right direction if we continue this momentum.

Have a great week, kittens and take time for mental breaks as needed~