Learn the Basics of Mental-Health First Aid

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More people than ever are experiencing issues such as anxiety and depression at work. If an employee comes to you showing signs of emotional distress, here are some steps you can take to manage the conversation. 

  • Acknowledge. Simply recognize your employee’s distress. Your acknowledgment of how they’re feeling will validate their emotions and increase their own awareness of their mood. Then, ask them to reflect on their emotional, physical, mental, and behavioral states at work, emphasizing that this reflection can happen privately and doesn’t need to be shared with you. 
  • Respond. Your job isn’t to provide therapy or counseling. But you can learn to apply therapeutic relationship skills. The most important of these is empathy, which can help a person in distress feel less alone, more understood, and unjudged. 
  • Present strategies. One tool that can help change behavior is cognitive reframing, a process that can help replace unhelpful thoughts with a more realistic and balanced view of a situation. Another is behavioral activation, a tool that spurs change by increasing opportunities to experience joy. 
  • Don’t overstep. Mental-health first aid is often only the first step in an employee’s mental health journey. Be prepared to direct them to professional mental health services and resources your organization offers.

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