Luan Hassett

There are a few options, but I like the idea of 1:1 mentorship in the form of deep inner work in the workplace. Again, some options for this already exist. I’m going to skip past why I don’t think they are very good. My wish is for more opportunity to explore the deeper factors as to why mental health workers don’t do their best work. What I’ve seen is that these factors include fear, anger, shame, defensiveness, social maladroitness, projection. So let’s address them!

The book ‘Reinventing Organizations’ and much of Joe Hudson’s work at Art of Accomplishment are the templates I have in mind. The idea is to use one’s work as a vehicle for personal growth. Things like workplace errors, conflicts, avoidance of making decisions, all become grist for the mill of emotional and spiritual development.

For example, among psychiatry registrars there can be a lot of avoidance around approving the letters we dictate to GPs. We speak into the dictaphone and at one point perhaps we hesitate. It doesn’t register as a big moment but two days later we read what we said in plain text, with all the awkwardness and unresolved uncertainty glaring back at us. It’s a bit like looking at one’s practice in the mirror. “Did I really say that?” and “I can’t believe I decided to do that..” and “I really don’t want this to be in the patient’s file.”

Using work as a spiritual practice we might have a sample of our dictations read out to us and be invited to do an emotional inquiry-style meditation while sitting in the discomfort. Or we could just have a discussion about it. We would then apply these practices to more consequential decisions.

“But what about…”

An objection which tends to come up is that many people don’t want to be that vulnerable with their co-workers. Workplace patterns have the same deep-seated psychological origins as relationship patterns, and so unravelling them can bring up a lot of emotions, or resistance to the emotions. People’s minds ask “how will I be able to face my co-workers?” and “will my boss trust me after we’ve explored the bad decisions I’ve been hiding from them?” My (somewhat uncompassionate) response is “clearly you’re unable to face your co-workers as it is” and “your boss already doesn’t trust you.”

I understand that you can’t usually talk people out of their resistance, and to be honest I have no desire to work with anyone who doesn’t want to be there. I am so passionate about this work that the idea of the space being contaminated by soft coercion is repulsive to me.

Fuck “workplace wellness.”

With that out of the way, there are practical things we can do, experiments on how best to combine pairs and groups. It could be that we take a registrar from one hospital, a registrar from another and a couple of GPs from different practices. Ultimately the target demographic is anyone who sees psychiatric patients in any setting (GPs, Primary Care Nursing, CMHT staff, Addiction Services, Counselling Services, Homeless Services, Housing Agencies, etc) and who is sincerely interested in this kind of personal development.

I’m confident many of them will be.

Finally

My theory is that institutions fail to the degree that they invite egoic self-conflict. Meaning, people who don’t really want to be there, people with relational trauma that stops them relishing any task that someone else told them to do, staff who are secretly sceptical of or hate psychiatry and the people it serves, registrars who identify as hampered poets (not looking at anyone in particular) etc etc. This creates enormous drag on the system. Meanwhile we are trying to solve climate change and AI unemployment, as well as the fact that many people with Schizophrenia don’t have secure or acceptable housing.

At the psychological level the most sustainable energy source is enjoyment. This is what psychiatry needs more of the most (sorry, Mental Health Commission) and it is the ultimate aim of work as a tool for spiritual development. When we learn how to enjoy the conflict, the projections, the anger and defensiveness, because we see the freedom that’s available in them and by moving through them, then we will have sustainable growth. We will at least have made our inner world a better place, and who knows where that will lead.