 There's another elephant in the room and you raise it in your book Suicide in the workplace There was a scene in a very famous movie called Network by Sydney Lamette and had the the actor Australian actor Peter Finch And he said very famously I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore and that became a catch-cry and it was a huge speech in depth and length and emotional commitment and His ability as an actor was boy. It was on show. He did it in one take They started to do a second take but they had to abandon it because he had heart problems We was getting too worked up. He and he had very serious heart problems and there he was at work over overextending his his physical abilities So thankfully they stopped shooting he ended up getting an Academy Award for that one take But he got it posthumously You could go on and talk about the the astounding irony of that particular workplace situation or you could talk about apocalypse now where Martin Sheen Legendarily when his character went mad at the end of the movie and he and he got accolades and awards for it But during the shooting of that they had to cut him off to hospital Of course in network the character shoots himself live on camera which was Considered overstating things a little bit by all the critics at the time and it was considered a black comedy until years later That very thing actually happened and Sidney Lumet and Patty Chayesky famously said at the time. This is not satire This is real life In your book, you have this amazing figure saying that somebody takes their own life every 40 Seconds around the world. That's an astounding statistic and whether it's 40 seconds or 40 minutes or once every 40 days You can't close the door after the horse's bolt. It's a classic case of too little too soon So what sort of research has been done about suicide in the workplace? The research on suicide in the workplace continues a Victorian study found that about 17% of the suicides in that state 17% were due to problems in workplace. So that's still very high. I mean 40 Suicide every 40 seconds around the world is huge Yet 80 75% to 80% of those are men so we have a huge problem with suicide and it may also aside and And you know one suicide is too many regardless of gender, but what can we do in the workplace? Obviously people are not happy You know, that is something that we get from people. They're not satisfied in the workplace And one of the reasons why they're not satisfied is because they they're not connecting with the purpose of their workplace and the workplace the purpose of their lives and a person with a purpose it's Like a ship without a rudder. It's it's Aimless it's not going anywhere and to be aimless for a human being is not a good thing Workplace is actually good for your mental health. I mean, you know, that's the irony It when we when we put a person with a mental health issue and in a work in work that is is Significant and it contributes back to the community that we see a better recovery overall So it's good for your mental health and yet if if you don't manage to connect to the values and the vision of the workplace On in your team, then you remain disengaged and that's when the danger starts because Suicide doesn't happen in community. It happens in isolation Suicide is decided in your head not in a collective And some people that suicide take a collective with them, but the decision is individual So we can do a lot in workplaces to turn that around as managers Is that's why I say mental wealth the book is a leadership book because it teaches managers how to lead their team So they're connected with with something meaningful one of the things that I see in in talking with so many organizations is that Sometimes there can be the attitude like if people have personal problems. They should leave that at home And if someone takes their life, well, it wasn't our risk. It wasn't our fault and it wasn't our responsibility And and that's right ultimately, you know, people take actions themselves Having said that there's still an impact on the business. So when we go around and we and deliver training Internationally one of the questions will often ask is, you know, just for a show of hands how many people know someone who has taken their life and You'll normally get seventy five eighty percent of the room say yes I know someone and yet it's something we don't talk about every day So all of not just the person who's taken their life, but all of their colleagues are going to be impacted as well So it's quite common for us to hear from organizations who perhaps have delayed You know doing anything in the space of mental health and then they contact us and say oh We we wish we'd come to you sooner because now we've had to shut down operations for Days weeks months sometimes because everybody's reacting to this incident that's happened, you know And and we don't know we're out of our depth. We don't know really how to handle this We like to keep our boxes of work is here and home is separate, but in reality people are like that They do they impact on each other So you've got to look at the whole person a whole employee and it's not just frontline It's can be very high-level people as well that yeah and talking about an employee Just every single individual how much responsibility do they have to take do we have to take as people? For our own workplace mental health a hundred percent I I believe that um no one cares about your life as much as you do period now Are they caring people around us that we can act we can we can Connect with and they can help us. Absolutely. They're there. Do they care a hundred percent about your life? They do but they can only care as much as you let them So that's an important thing I see a lot of emphasis on stopping suicide I think that's the wrong focus what we need to focus is how do we connect with people? How do we make people happy so happy? They don't want to die People just want to die because they're not happy Suicide is a symptom. It's not the problem. It's a very fatal But you know the problem is people are not happy connected people happy people don't want to kill themselves So that's why we're going to go back. We've got to go back to the basics And this is why I like workplaces workplaces sure they're artificial We come together in an artificial way, but they're highly social workplaces We can we in in some workplaces. I've seen them operate almost like a family. They can't wait to go to work I've seen most workplaces that doesn't happen But you know in some teams they love each other they they're there for each other They've got each other's back And how do you create that and that's that's always changing as well Because there will be that group dynamic will shift and people will come and people will leave and then that can And it's up to the manager to sustain that To know how to talk to people to know when to talk to people to know what to say to what not to say What to do because sometimes people won't talk but they'll do Okay, so how much can a workplace Actually support a team member who's suffering mental health. How far can they go? That's a good question. And that's one that a lot of the managers have as well And it's it's really important that they know the limits of their capability as well We're not upskilling people to be counselors or Psychologists or therapists or anything like that even though some of them might like to go that far We can see that can be counterproductive as well So it's really important. They know where that line is and that's things like identifying it in the first place As a human being one person to another having a conversation and showing care showing compassion as you spoke about earlier Showing empathy Sharing information about you know, what are some of the options because it's not just One size fits all solution when it comes to mental health, you know, everyone's situation is so completely different You know what works for one person may not work for someone else So managers need to be really careful that they're not giving advice Or you know what worked for me But that they're opening up a conversation and and allowing the person to go and get the support they need from wherever they need it But they're and they're they're on the side as a a go-to person If if there's anything here in the workplace that that may I may be able to assist with Can't promise the world. I can't do everything But I'm here and we'll talk about it and let's keep that line of communication open And it's amazing what people are able to do when we feel supported You know just to know someone's got our back That sometimes that's all that is needed, you know for that little bit extra energy And that's that's what we're talking about sometimes, you know that that energy to climb out of a hole And sometimes guess what once they find out that somebody has got their back They find out there was no hole to begin with They just had this idea in their head That's what we find with conflict when people get to talk to each other they realize oh Oh, so you didn't mean that. Oh, right. Okay. So I've wasted two days of my life Making this huge problem in my head that has disappeared by a two minute conversation So we teach people how to have that conversation in the book as well