 Hello. Hello. Can everyone hear me? Hi. Welcome. Just settle down. Welcome to Just Co and to She Says. This is our third event of the year so far and we're very happy to have you all here despite the rain. Thank you for coming down. Just to give you a background about us. She Says is actually one of the biggest global creative networks for women in the creative industries. So we've been around in Singapore for about four to five years and we are actually the local chapter that was brought here by Lizzie, Mira, and Vicky. Mira is at the back there. She's one of our panelists for tonight so we'll be hearing a lot from her. So we have a very strong network that's about 2,000 strong and we're still growing every day and we keep seeing new faces and that's very encouraging for us as well. And so actually I'll introduce our volunteers. We've got a few volunteers here tonight. Can you guys raise your hands? You'll see them registering you at the door, selling some healthy snacks at the side and helping us with our social media as well. So tonight we're using the hashtag She Says SG and hashtag Living Strong. So if you're on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, feel free to put out the word. Okay and so tonight's topic is Living Strong and Mental Health in the Workplace and coincidentally today is the International Happiness Day with Dalai Lama as the patron. We did not plan that. So we are hoping that today you guys will maybe learn something about how to take care of your mental health, how to live a happier, fuller life, and also forgive us because we are super stressed. It's my first panel ever as a moderator. Okay, so on our agenda we'll have a panel discussion and then questions and answers. My name is Marta and you know me probably as one of the volunteers. I'm always here, sometimes behind the camera. I'm a creative project manager formerly with Cisco, currently looking for new opportunities. And I'm Alicia. I'm on the Digital and Innovation Team at Accenture. I've been with she says for more than a year now. So this is our team of volunteers and we organize alternate sessions each month of networking as well as panel sessions. So this would not be possible without all of them. And of course we'd like to thank our sponsor, Cisco for the event space. Farah, would you like to say a few words? Welcome to Cisco. Whoever have not been here before, Cisco is currently Singapore's largest co-working space. We opened up two years ago, 2015 and we have four now within CBD, opening up four more and literally dominating the region sector in April onwards. So very quickly we have been big supporters of she says. Love them, please join us more. We have alternate events at Cisco. And yeah, just enjoy the night. If you see this little feedback form, please fill in, let us know how we can make this better both for she says and for Cisco. Enjoy your night ladies engines. Thank you. Also a shout out to our partner for tonight, MadeReal. You can see some of the snacks displayed there on the table, one of our volunteers selling them. MadeReal is everything that we love about businesses. So it's female founded, it's health conscious, and it provides us with delicious food. Also you know it's scientifically proven that nuts and almonds and seeds are good for your brain and good for your mental health. So we'll encourage you to try some of those out. Smaller bags are only 250, so try them out. And our tech partner for tonight supporting us, engineers.sg, they provide coverage from all the tech meetups and events in town. And you can go to their website if you want to see what's going on in Singapore and watch some of the sessions that you couldn't attend in person. And Michael there in the purple shirt is helping us out and filming tonight's event. Okay. And the topic for tonight. So first of all I guess good news statistically, Singaporeans are faring better when it comes to mental health than let's say citizens of the US. So you guys are like healthier and stronger. But still, you know like the mental health of working Singaporeans, it's 13% lower than that of the general population. Which means that work and balancing your private life and work, that's something that is extremely stressful. And we are all under lots of pressure. And then almost 10% of Singapore residents will struggle with at least one mood or anxiety disorder during their lifetime. So imagine 10% that's one person out of a group of 10. That's definitely one of your friends or someone in your family. And you might not even know that. So tonight we would like to talk about early signs, how to notice that in yourself, how to ask for help, where to find that help. And then how to manage that, how to overcome that and how to live successfully even if you're under constant pressure. And we would like to invite our four wonderful panellists to take seats, join us on the stage and introduce themselves. So give a round of applause for our panellists. Hello, I'm Tegin from Wonderful People. I'm a professional certified coach, trained in a psychology modality called Process Work. Hi, I'm Liz Piper from Life Weavers. I'm an occupational therapist currently providing services in hospitals and in the community. Hello, I'm Marianne. I'm managing director of Malano Salt, which is a PR agency. Hi, I'm Mira. I'm with Ascension, also proud that she says team here. All right, thank you everyone for being here. We'd actually like to start off the session with a bit of a personal story from Mira about some of the challenges she faced with regards to illnesses and how she got back into the workspace after a brief period away. This is going to be fun. Hi, I'm Mira. So some of you might know me. I work at Ascension and I'm part of the digital innovation team. I'm also the loudest person in the office. So you're going to hear me like a mile away in most situations. So jokes, I mean, one of the things that I do whenever I get uncomfortable or awkward is that I start making really inappropriate jokes or just comments that some people just don't understand. So my background is that I actually have two brain tumors, one on my pituitary gland and one on my brainstem. I've had the one on my pituitary gland, which is where all your hormones come from since I was 12. And then I got the second one about two and a half years ago. And when I first got diagnosed with it, I went to the hospital here and they told me it was a crossfit injury and so they sent me home for two months and put me on a ton of codeine and tramadol. And I kept on going back to work and I was having really bad headaches but I just kept on going to work and I just kept on telling myself, oh, it's just a headache, it's going to pass. But then finally I went into hospital and it was pretty nasty because I was in ICU for about three weeks and then in a regular ward for about three weeks a month the first time and then the second time was two weeks and then another week. So I was in and out of hospital for about eight months. I think when anyone talks about health, you have this assumption that the person who seated next to you, the person seated in front of you, definitely doesn't really have anything to worry about. You've got it all together, you got dressed in the morning, you managed to do your makeup, got your hair done. But actually it's probably one of the most, it's probably a very hard thing and I think to a lot of people, if you do know someone who's going through something or if you yourself a person going through something, it's totally fine. When I came out the first time, I had OCD because of the types of medication I was on. I had OCD, I had depression, anxiety. I had suicidal thoughts as well for a good amount of time. The mistake that I made was going back to work too early. So when I left, you know, so I'm Singaporean and being Asian, I'm going to say like you're growing up and if you tell an aunt or an uncle, oh, I'm actually going to take a month or two off work, they're like, how? You're taking a month or two off work, how can you do that? You have to work. You know, it's a huge burden on your parents or your family or, you know, all the dramatics, right? Yeah, you know what I mean. So I just, but actually the mistake that I made was I went back to work way too quickly. What I would say, and I know Alicia and Marta asked me to think about a couple of things I would say to people in the room who probably feel that you need to take a little bit of a time out or if you're having that anxiety attack or if you're not feeling well, you haven't been well for a while and you forced yourself to go back to work. There are a couple of things that I would probably say about how I managed it. One of the mistakes that I made at the very beginning was I went back to work and didn't tell anyone that I had been sick. All I had said was, oh yeah, I just took some time out, wasn't feeling well, but now I'm okay. But what I wasn't telling people was when I have a conversation with you at 9 o'clock in the morning, I'm not going to remember that you and I had this conversation by 12 o'clock because I won't remember your face. I won't remember the topic. I won't remember how long this conversation took and I'm just not going to remember you. But what I did do was I told my office best friend and he was well aware of what was going on. So every time we had a conversation with someone who was new, he'd be like, oh Mira, you remember so and so we met them this morning where we talked about X, Y and Z and the other person on the other side would just kind of be like, this is a really strange conversation but all right, but it will pass. So be open with the people who are closest to you about what's going on. I think one of the other things I also, I would probably say is it's actually okay to tell your boss what's going on. The mistake, well, not really a mistake, but the thing that I did was I did tell my boss, but I didn't tell him the full story. So when it came to the promotions discussion that was going on at the time, someone used the illness that I had as a reason why I shouldn't get promoted. So even though I've been working really hard for a year and a half, the fact I took six months off, I shouldn't be promoted because she took six months off and the hiring and the promotions line accounts for a 12-month period, not a six-month period, so it doesn't matter that you worked your ass off in the first six months. The fact of the matter is it didn't work for the first, the whole 12. So honestly, that's the world that we're living in and you need to be able to recognize that there are team members out there who are going to fight for you. Have that conversation with the people that are around you and know that it's going to be okay. I don't want to kind of ramble on because I really want to get into the panel, but I think my main thing is, so I'm the patient here in a way, the mental patient here, but I would say that if you're having any fears, if you're having any anxieties, I still get anxiety attacks. So today on a regular basis, I get very nervous and when I get nervous, I just can't get out of bed and I have a tendency to get on WhatsApp and just generally text Alicia a lot at the office and just have a mild panic attack about something, but just recognize, know that there are people out there who are going through the exact same situation that you're going through, you're not alone and if you're ever facing any difficulties, just know that it will get better at some point, but you've got to give it time. So that's pretty much how I'll start just to kind of open it up a little bit. Okay, so when Alicia and I discussed this panel, came up with questions for our panelists. We really had some trouble about defining what we want to talk about, defining what mental health is, defining what all the problems that we want to discuss really are. So I guess I would like to first ask our panelists for a definition, maybe, especially the mental health professionals here. What mental health is, what depression, anxiety, panic attacks really are and how should we talk about that? What kind of proper language should we use to discuss that? Because my therapy modality is non-mainstream, so I think it's better for you to set the common baseline definition and I'm in with my angle. Oh, okay. All right, so I think I would start when we're talking about mental health is that often we have, we can perceive it as something that you either have or you don't. But actually like mental health, we all have mental health, we all experience some form of mental health problem through our lives, we will all experience what it feels like to be depressed when we lose a loved one. We will all experience anxiety if perhaps a loved one, if we know a loved one is in the operating theatre and we're sitting at the door and we're waiting to hear that they're okay. So we can all relate to mental health problems, conditions, we can all relate to depression and anxiety on a certain level and I think it's really important for us to be really aware of that because that kind of makes it for me less scary when I think one of the, I know we're going to talk about stigmas later but sometimes when people become a little bit of afraid or speaking about mental health problems because of the stigmas because often people either don't know how to respond to it or they're worried that other people won't know how to respond to it. When we're talking clinically about anxiety or depression that's actually about showing a set of symptoms that relate to that condition consistently over a period of six months. So if somebody's talking about clinical depression it means they've already passed that six month mark but really if somebody's experiencing depression for one week that doesn't mean that it's to be discredited either. So depression is when we're looking more at feelings of despair, feelings of hopelessness, detachment, the separation with anxiety will be more about continuous worry. It can be a heightened sense of alertness and panic. We're talking about panic attacks before and inability to cope or deal with the situation. So I think that's kind of like that covers the basics. Yeah. So there's a clinical textbook definition. Okay. So I'm going to frame mental health very differently. So there's always something we want inside ourselves and the thing is how much does the reality match what we desire? Okay. So is there a congruence? Is there a coherence? Usually when it doesn't match, that's when we say, ah, okay, that's when I have a problem, right? So the thing is when you have that incongruence so that's when we might consider, I have a problem, maybe you don't want to seek help or want to seek some support to get the problems resolved. And the thing is mental health is probably, is more like a representative of how well do you understand your inner landscape, your feelings, your thoughts, how are they coming together, affecting your action and creating the kind of reality that you want. So that will be my definition of it. So my good news is anything that happens even if it's so-called bad, okay, undesirable, or it's like disturbing to you, it's actually a mirror for you to get back, to reconnect to yourself, to really discover what's really important and put that into action. I guess I would like to ask, and maybe Marianne, you'll be able to answer that question. Why are we talking about mental health in the context of workplace? Like why did we choose this topic really? So we were talking earlier about the flight or fight syndrome and I think the workplace is a very significant source of stress, let's be honest. And I think it's even more so if you're an entrepreneur, which many of you are, because the pressures come not only externally but also within. You're just driven to succeed, you don't want to fail, you're just so kind of critical of your own success. So in terms of my sort of experience, I've suffered from panic attacks, but I have conquered them, I hope, but they were all triggered by work. And I think each time that they've happened, I've been sort of forced to the point where it's expressed itself physically, which is what a panic attack is, where you kind of stop breathing and you faint and you just want to be extracted from that situation, whatever it is. And if I look back on the places where I've had them, they're ridiculous, it's a workshop with a client, which was not great. Or it was just before a meeting where I knew I wasn't very well prepared and I just wanted to be kind of pulled out of that situation, which, and you can't just say, do you know what, my head feels a bit doolally, I need to go and I'll lie down. So you're kind of forced to, it's almost like you bring it on a panic attack on purpose because a physical thing is so much easier to talk about and so much sort of more acceptable. It's much more acceptable to faint because you stop breathing or your skin, then it is to say, I don't want to be here. So yeah, so I think workplace is a really significant cause of anxiety in particular. And I think the fact that we need to be constantly on is a really big trigger for that. You can never be off. Even when you've got your office on, people kind of WhatsApp you, we've got clients what's happening us all the time. So multiple channels of people trying to get in touch with you and that always-on feeling, I think, is a big reason why we're seeing such a spike in anxiety. So based on that, what are some of the early signs and signals that we can look out for before it becomes a full-blown problem or before you get overwhelmed to the point where you don't know what to do? I had a burnout once. I experienced that. So I just caught myself having this pattern, having a big meltdown. First I caught it happening every about six months and it became more and more frequent. Okay, so I think another thing we can think about is our mind and our body. We're connected and a lot of times when we, like anxiety, it's a stress. It's a form of stress. Now when we evolved as human beings, stress is a survival instinct. So when we get stressed, we perceive something as a threat. It can be a physical threat or a psychological threat. What happens is our body dumps 30, around 30 hormones into our blood system, which gives us a massive surge of energy and then this whizzes around our body so we can either fight off the threat or we can run away. And what we can start acknowledging is when we have those patterns, those surges of energy, when we start to feel some people, they'll have like a tick. You'll notice they have like they're twitching their eye or they're constantly tapping or their legs are shaking or something like that. And this is the body's way of actually trying to get rid of all that energy that has been just put into your blood system. So you can start looking at it from a physical, you might be able to start looking at it from a physical level. And then the other thing that will happen is your digestion will be suppressed because if you're fighting something or running away, your body doesn't want to be spending energy on your digestion. So that stops. So you might start finding that you're getting tummy cramps and you don't know why or that your toileting isn't as routine as normal, for example, you might get constipated or you might get diarrhea more often. So this can be another warning sign. And then the other thing that happens when we're under stress for a long period of time is that our immune system is completely, almost completely suppressed because again, this isn't a function that your body needs when it's fighting for its life. So you might notice that you start picking things up really easily. I used to say I only had to look at a person to get a cold when I was working in a hospital and that was quite a lot of the time. So your body will often give you these little warning signs and it's very easy for us to kind of just brush it off. Oh, I just get sick a lot or I'm busy, my digestion isn't like this or I'm getting tummy cramps maybe because I'm not eating properly. But maybe when we look a little bit deeper it might be our body giving us that signal that we're pushing it beyond its limits for too long. I think just kind of looking at the people that you work with there were four things that always came to my mind. It's food, quality of work, the way that people connect within a team and also just laughter. So when it comes to food, one of the things we've got a guy that we work with who shall remain nameless. Whenever he used to go through a breakup you knew that something wasn't right because he wouldn't eat lunch. He would literally just stay at his desk and he would just kind of mull over everything. I've worked with someone who the minute she stopped arguing very quickly in meetings, you knew something was off because she was one of those people who was just like I have an opinion, you will listen to what I have to say and no one's going to let go. You're all going to listen to everything I have to say but when she was just like, yeah, sure, okay, whatever. You knew something was wrong and also connecting whenever my team feels down what I notice is that they kind of disappear off by themselves. It's either it's maybe more cigarette breaks where they'll just go downstairs and just kind of be smoking like three or four versus going for one with a group of people or they'll go downstairs and take a ridiculously long time to grab a cup of coffee. But I think one of the things that always does come to my mind is when people are doing that don't immediately jump to the conclusion that they're being lazy or that they're not doing the right thing or that they are trying to kind of swipe corners. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of empathy for us to recognize that. I'm a firm believer in tough love but at the same time you just keep an eye out, right? Because you know these triggers, you actually see them but whether or not you want to accept that they've happened just like when you accept something has happened that's a different story altogether. In terms of symptoms as well I think it's really important to know in yourself what are your own strange techniques and I've only recently realized that I have anxiety my husband looked at me like I was mad he clearly saw it for 20 years before I did but just kind of spotting the links between all of the things that you do insomnia is often a very early kind of sign that things aren't quite right and for me my husband will say you were scratchy head last night and apparently I lie like this scratching my head and we used to joke about it and now I realize that's when I'm at my most anxious so just kind of being aware of those funny little behaviors that you have and for me it's not just the physical things which are you stop eating properly your skin breaks out you don't go and drink water because then you have to go to the loo and you have time to go to the loo like all of these things that become these strange sort of patterns but also for me I start to shut down from my family and friends because I just fall up to here I haven't got time to kind of WhatsApp or reply or LinkedIn I just kind of shut down to kind of cope and then my mom ends up texting me saying are you alive, what's going on so just really be aware when you can see those kind of things exacerbating and ramping up because that is probably quite a sign that you're heading for something that you don't want to happen and a lot of mental health seems to be about getting there before it becomes too big an issue so all that being said I would think that all those symptoms is something that I experienced, my friends experienced and I'm very open about my own struggles and just wonder why the stigma why all those negative preconceptions about mental health problems why are we so quick to judge people when we all experience similar things or observed our loved ones going for similar things hmm that means the cultural thing especially coming in Singapore we tend to be pretty mesochistic on ourselves we are hard workers, we are very industrious, we value that and that's very little in our upbringing and education about what it means to understand ourselves and being connected to our emotions, our feelings, how we think so we are basically trained to execute and do so it's a very systemic thing but knowing seeing that people are here there are conversations around people getting curious what does it mean to be balanced, to be more holistic so that's a good news so it's turning around I think historically as well if we look way back into the hundreds of years ago we've got lots of very nasty words to label mental health and that's one of those things that has been built into vocabulary and we actually use, I mean we don't we don't obviously but some people will use it to be offensive to somebody as well and then we see in the media that the person that killed their family had schizophrenia and we see in the media that this happened because they were chronically depressed and we kind of always hear those really extreme versions of what happens when somebody has a mental health illness and it goes unsupported so I think there is an element of fear as well sometimes people might see a crazy person and cross the street because they're scared of what they might do but yeah, now in recent times the conversation like today is being turned around that those are actually really vulnerable people and it's not right for us to cross the road what we need to do now is lend a hand so I think, yeah In terms of the workplace I think there's a preconception that having a mental health issue is a sign of weakness and I think that's particularly hard as you get more senior because admitting a flaw or vulnerability is hard and you sort of feel like if you admit it you might lose your job or you'll certainly lose your place in the pecking order or you'll always be labelled that one that had the breakdown which you then think might impact you in sort of future times but I think senior role models are really important and I never speak on panel events my colleague Alpha will know this but this one in particular, I've been at her six years I've never spoken on a panel event but this one I think is so important because I think it's so important for people to talk and to break down this stigma and to be a role model and to kind of share what it feels like I think just if there's a stigma I think it just comes down to this is just me personally sometimes you don't it's very difficult to admit that there's a massive flaw in the matrix or the program or whoever you are as a person we are trained and there's a great TED talk at the moment about the idea of negativity so there is this assumption that the minute you say I have anxiety or you make a negative comment about yourself that you are someone who people shouldn't hang out with or that shouldn't be on a team because great teams are built on positive energy and recognizing and always pushing forward and sometimes having a negative stigma like saying I have anxiety attacks or I have panic attacks or there are certain days where I just struggle to get out of bed which means I'm depressed that people will assume that you're not going to be at 100% people don't understand it sometimes and so I think for me when I look at the world of consulting consulting as a whole we have a lot of people who have anxiety, who have manic depression in one of the consulting companies in Singapore deep vein thrombosis and depression is an acute I think it's acute depression has the MDs in this one business which is not essential by the way just to clarify it's an impact of one in seven managing directors or partners in this one firm that's a huge number and the fact of the matter is if there was someone who was there to help them say hey, it's okay there is someone here who's going through it it might have been a little bit easier so we're talking about how difficult it is to be vulnerable why it's still a stigma and how difficult it is to open up so what are some of the unhealthy ways that you've seen people cope and how can those be replaced with healthier ways to cope with whatever you're going through okay, I can start on this one one of my three tips on the Facebook page so I can speak for myself and I'm sure I speak for some of us here that self-medicating with alcohol can be quite fun it can feel great before and during but usually feels a bit rubbish after and I think the key thing when I'm talking about booze here is self-medicating so I'm not saying if you drink booze or you enjoy a drink there's a problem that's not what I'm saying at all it's about when you're feeling so anxious that the only way you can think about lowering those feelings is by having a drink and that actually makes sense because alcohol is a depressant so as a medicine, if you like actually physically depress those feelings which is why it makes you feel better so if you find that you're reaching for the bottle because it makes you feel that you can control those feelings that's kind of a signal that something's going wrong now when we start to depend on that as a coping mechanism we start drinking more and we all know that alcohol affects our ability to go into deep sleep so then when we're not sleeping properly we're waking up on an energy deficit when we go to work with an energy deficit what happens is we're more susceptible or we have a lower tolerance to stress if we have a lower tolerance to stress we're more likely to feel anxiety when we're feeling more anxiety we're more likely to go down the pub and have a bottle of wine so it's identifying that I think alcohol is one thing that we can all relate to which is why I would bring it up there might be other things that people use to comfort themselves like really fatty foods for example or that real feel good cheese and all those sort of things and so going back to what I was saying about the stress response having a load of energy in your body when you're feeling very stressed so the other side dealing with anxiety and stress in a healthy way is exercise and that doesn't need to be like thrashing it out for an hour at the gym it doesn't need to be training for 10K it can be something gentle it can be yoga my key advice for this would be during your working day if possible set a little timer on your phone or put it on vibrate if you're going to disturb others and every 40 minutes just stand up and walk to the other end of the office and back or stand up and do 5 squats or something like that once you start doing this and incorporating this into your work lifestyle I promise you you will start to feel a difference concentrate your productivity and also your ability to identify stress and manage it in a healthier way so be able to listen to your body and alcohol doesn't always help us listen to our bodies so yeah okay so maybe I'll share a bit about the resilience like the buzzword in the workplace right now but the angling of what resilience in nowadays is like you have to be very young you have to be strong this is the usual connotation about what resilience brings to mind in the workplace but recently there's an article that came out so resilience is not so much about the young part but the resilience is really are you doing enough to replenish yourself so that you can continue to go the extra mile so are you doing that enough do you know what turns you on do you know what your vitamins are your own essential thing your energy gives you joy makes you feel engaged are you doing enough of that so it's not always about this for my anxiety the most useful thing was actually Pilates I'm not at all sporty I hate sport running, walking even and I couldn't really get on with mindfulness or yoga or anything but Pilates for me because it's so it's so technical and it doesn't have space to think so it just shuts down the voices so I just find it really mindful but I also know that when the stressors come with work I will cancel or drop out so I've deliberately bought a package of 20 one to one sessions that are all diarised and it costs me an ominolag but it means that I don't cancel it because I know that my behaviour is that I will prioritise work and just not go but I know that I need to for resilience and I've actually put it into my diary because I felt that people wouldn't book meetings over a physio appointment because that sounds kind of more serious than Pilates I'm just giving away my trick there so prioritise it put it in your diary I love the tip that Arianna Huffington says about going to bed so she says we set an alarm to wake up but we don't set one to go to sleep and I think that's such a good tip to really kind of prioritise putting yourself to bed at the right time um I would have always said sport like I love Ufit I go to them way too often and I would always have said go for a run go for a walk or something like that but this is like a really embarrassing fact so one of the things when I got out of hospital was I was on steroids which makes you really hungry there's a thing that you get that really goes into the size of a balloon and so I was super embarrassed to even walk out of my house so when I came out of hospital the first thing that I did was I ordered McDelivery four times in one day and went through about 100 chicken nuggets in one day trust me I recognize that look trust me I know but I seriously ate to the point where I was just like because you're so hungry at that point I was so hungry I didn't know why but what actually helped me with kind of managing things was one of the things beyond a healthy body is a healthy mind and sometimes you might not necessarily be ready to talk to someone but what I did was that I downloaded The New York Times, The Atlantic Wall Street Journal, The Economist and I think a bunch of like um girls American or European and the Guardian and Vice News and I went through them and I made a decision every time I want to take a break or if I'm going to be doing something like going downstairs to you know get a drink or instead of going to a corner and bursting into tears or trying to order McDelivery again or make a run for Krispy Kreme I'm going to go instead and pick up the app and I'm going to go through four or five articles and that's what I'm going to do and then I'm going to call my best friend I'm going to make him listen to me as I tell him about what I read and we're going to have a conversation about it and bless his heart he listened to me for a good like one and a half years but so friends that's probably another thing so yeah okay so I guess um the big thing that we wanted to talk about is how to create this workplace culture where we all feel that we can be vulnerable when our time comes where we can talk about our problems and how they affect our productivity which is a fact um so what are the steps that we should take and how can we make sure that our colleagues our employees if you guys are managers that they feel safe in that space and that we can start having those conversations because we discussed that with Alicia before employees often have those reservations and this is something that Mira mentioned as well you are worried that if you'll be vulnerable if you'll mention those things to your colleagues something bad might happen at work right so like how do we create that space how do we talk about that and maybe Marianne um I think it's quite important that it's not a one size fits all um some people may want to talk some people may not want to talk to their colleagues and that's okay but I think making sure that there are different ways for people to kind of self medicate so to just you know say I quite like the expression duvet days for example it's not right for every organization but something that just says it would be great if it was a mental health day but just says I'm off today no questions asked um I think that's really important I think encouraging things like um flexible working so if you're having like a really full on time just being able to work from home or come in late or just be there in the afternoon to hang out with your cats at home is really important and that means that trust is really important in the workplace that you kind of trust your employees to work as they would if they're at home I hate the kind of culture of presenteeism here in Singapore it's it's not the same in the UK there is a different mentality to coming in and out of the office I think probably because it takes about three hours without the office in London so the flexibility and I think also just making sure there is a structural kind of safety net for people that you know are becoming more sort of clinically depressed um as well as those that are kind of just coping with stresses and pressures day to day I think finally the kind of leadership from the top is really important so my own boss um suffers from clinical depression um and she's been very openly talking about it on LinkedIn to us as teams and we've actually made mental health our kind of strategic priority as a company this year to put it into our values our behaviors to train our line managers so that they can talk about it and to kind of help each other in spotting symptoms amongst each other so we know what our kind of stress behaviors are and can just kind of help each other out a little bit more because we're all under the cosh um particularly in the kind of stressful working environment um in Singapore um sorry what's the question again talk about it sorry I just had a moment um I think one of the big things is and I'm going to come from the perspective of someone who's like mid-level working in a mall in a very Singaporean firm yeah um it's it's a bitch honestly to be able to go into the office knowing that you know that most of your you might think that most of your bosses might not understand and they're going to be concerned because they're like if you know if Mira is not in the office from 9 to 9 or have the capabilities to work from 9 to 10 every day you're not an asset you're disposable because I need someone who's going to be committed well frankly if you work in an office like that you got to quit and if you're not feeling well because frankly there is no point putting yourself through the hell of working a 16-hour day and this I'm going to be like a bit controversial here but what's the point of working a 16-hour day if you don't have your mental health you just cut your lifespan down by like 20 years you're never going to be happy you're always going to be searching for something more and at some point you're going to go and take you know take off for a year and come out the back end of it just being like where the last 20 years go my friends are all happy I'm not that happy so frankly if you're not I think that if you're not one of the things to do is at least for me coming again from a consulting background is you should be able to have a frank and open conversation with your mentor and with your boss they need to recognize that it is a situation and what I did was that I actually sent an email to my boss with my neurosurgeons email address my neurologist as well as the people the oncologist and everyone who was involved in my case and I said this is the actual scientific case details these are the doctors that have background on my case in the event of an emergency I won't be able to function so I need you to get in touch with these doctors and that's just something to let you know and then after that I met up with my boss Nils coffee and he was the one who actually approached me and he said to me so how you actually feeling so I and I literally said to him I actually don't remember anyone from this morning and I'm actually struggling to walk up the stairs because at that point walking up like a flight of stairs was like a marathon for me so he was just right okay let's just sit down here and we'll have a cup of coffee and so you need to be able to have that conversation with your boss to just say it's not great it's actually really hard and if you don't get it if he or she doesn't get it then it's time to go to a business or go to a team within the business who understands what you're going through and the but at the same time you can't take a victim perspective you can't sit there and expect that everyone's going to bend down to your needs and to your desires you just need to accept that there needs to be a balance things are hard you need to work in an environment that caters to that support system but at the same time your history your illness your mental health does not define your future and who you are that's only a situation that a hump that you're dealing with right now it's going to get better but right now you just need to have an environment or a support structure that's going to be able to enable you to get over it so that you can continue back on your mission your life goal so in my last organization they had this quite useful thing it was I can't remember what the proper name was but we had like a mental health champion and this person had been on courses on how to basically be a mental health champion in an organization and they were the person who anybody could go to with an issue so it wasn't a manager it wasn't anybody in super seniority actually it was kind of the person was someone who was tucked away in the office most of the time and nobody really knew who they were so that worked out quite well for most people and that they could go and talk to them and they didn't need to say I'm having the ABC and D problem but they just needed to let them know and then that person acted on their behalf as kind of their mental health liaison so if they didn't want to go and speak directly to anybody or they were having issues with that then they had that support and it was kind of a little bit impartial so that started to work quite well and I think something we can all do as staff on a ground level is try and like ask for policies to help with things like return to work which has been spoken about today so having a return to work policy which means this might be after an illness, after an injury or even after maternity leave so acknowledging that when somebody had like six months off work you're not going to be able to start performing at the same productivity that you were when you were on a roll kind of thing and that you're going to need you're not going to be lumped with the same amount of work and especially when people come back from leave I think we're all guilty of it sometimes the team members go oh great they're back, you can have all your work back and then that can actually impede their recovery and how they reintegrate back into work so just having that you know if people need to come in for half a day, a week or whatever the arrangement needs to be so trying to enforce like policies and official support systems like that can be good because then you know you've got that piece of paper to fall back on that it's actually there is an official thing within the organization so you don't need to feel that you're being a burden or who do I talk to, you've got that kind of set in stone so for me I'm probably going back a few questions that we asked before so talking about the history of psychology and dynastic labels so it's creating an official cycle situation right now so historically when psychology first came in everybody knows Freud so it looks at how people malfunction so that's when we talk about psychology the word unconscious begins to ring that bell but by now psychology has already gotten through a few cycles of paradigms so departing from the dysfunctional view in the 70s humanistic psychology came into picture about how do people really excel and become better at what we do and that's really the in thing now so actually now it's what we call transpersonal psychology so why this piece of information okay so we are caught in this vicious cycle the dynastic label itself causes people to react with a person in a certain light and that sometimes isn't the most helpful and it becomes even more stigma for a person to speak out this is what I'm going through and that's why people don't say on one hand I wish to normalize that going ups and downs is a natural cycle of life we have all the peaks and troughs and so it's to be compassionate to be empathic to hold the space where people are simply going through their rough spots and it's really nothing wrong in that sense but also at the same time having that dynastic label is also unfortunately now what we can draw attention to is about what I'm going through I really need the support so now we are caught in between these two things yeah so we understand an overview of why it's important to identify what you're going through and the importance of managing your feelings especially at the workplace we had some specific questions come in about being an inner critic to yourself based on how we talk to ourselves when we don't want to share our feelings with our managers or with our co-workers or our loved ones and you put that pressure on yourself and be your own worst enemy in that case what are some of the things that you've seen around that and how can we deal with such issues okay, inner critic there are these two categories one is you created it yourself it's your own honestly speaking, when you're traveling to work with it on yourself we all hold conferences inside our heads we all have little conversations so sometimes when the inner critics come out and they start to bash ourselves up some of us are rolling our eyes already one helpful thing is whatever it is criticizing you do a reality check sometimes we made that into a reality but are people really expecting that of us or we just assume so reality check helps second thing is your own your own organic inner critic sometimes it's really just trying to be helpful but not in the best ways so this will require a bit of more work to distill how the inner critic is really trying to help you you need to be more perfect you need to be this, you need to be that so maybe you just interview your inner critic back are you really trying to contribute here be more helpful here so maybe after some inner dialogue sometimes you're a bit sloppy and therefore being a bit more precise about how you work is really going to be helpful to you now and then so once you get the message good you can shut up right now I get you and really bring into action how you can live more of that attribute in your life more so that voice doesn't really have that much power over you second category of inner critic doesn't really belong to you but it's like criticism you've received externally but you have absorbed into yourself and you made it into your own voice like when I was about 14 I was just daydreaming in front of a food stall so it was obvious to me that there were flies flying around the food and the teacher next to me just said no initiative suddenly I have this label slapped over me then I have to live with this label for the most part of my life right then reality check is that first you have to catch it of course right is it valid so be brave enough to have a conversation with it do you really have a place for me in my life right here right now nope go away just don't have that inner critic conversation with yourself out in public don't have that conversation I've done that before it's not good I think when it comes to the inner critic so I was actually talking to a crystal just now about the concept of a mission I think anyone who says to you you should never care about what anyone else thinks you should only care about what you think so there are sociopaths because everyone cares about what everyone thinks we are human however what we should always be concerned about is your mission in life and your mission changes with every stage of your life the mission I'm on right now is completely different to what it was two years ago which was different to what it was the four years before that or the first time I entered my career when I built my five-year plan when I was 25 the one thing to always just kind of keep in mind if you do have like an inner critic is you know on your phone so actually someone I know does this quite regularly as well you're on the notes page I've got a list of like what are the five or ten things I want to hit by the end of this year and within the next two years so every time someone comes at me and says you know why are you running the program this way or why are you running a client pitch this way or why is it that you've framed or you are working on a project in a certain manner when the client wants something else you need to go back to that list that list is something that you've done for the year or be it for the project that you're working on what exactly is it that you were meant to do you're not here to please you can't please everyone but what you can do is ensure that the mission or what if you're in account servicing or in a client related role that you're doing what you sold or what you've promised to sell or promised to deliver the results same as when you go into the office when you went in for your interview you were very clear with your boss or your interviewee about what your capabilities were but at the same time you set the expectations on what him or her needed to do for you as a business they needed to train you they promised you that you were going to be taught certain skills so as much as you're going to criticize yourself all of those elements that have been promised to me has that happened because to be frank we learn only if we are allowed time to learn and only if we are allowed to be allowed the time to learn those skill sets if you don't also it's not something that your boss has to put aside for you it's also time that you need to make on your own so instead of shooting off at 6 o'clock to run to China Square maybe it's about 1 o'clock to 7 o'clock just jumping on your phone on the bus on the way home and listening to that TEDx podcast or listening to Udemy or something like that about upgrading your skills or something I have a very very critical inner critic so I'm not really sure I have a very good case study on it one of the things that's helped me is it's very easier in retrospect to identify when your thoughts have gone a bit loopy and this is a trivial example but very often with anxiety it is trivial things so my client called me in for a meeting and he said the topic was snow PR and I was like Google snow PR and I was like oh they're an agency in London oh we're going to get fired I wrote up all my notes I told the board I was like we're going to get fired we're going to shut down our office out here just my thoughts went in with my note ready to be like thank you it's not you it's me we're both here so this is a briefing for the project snow PR and I was like pull my piece of paper I put it back in my cupboard so that's been quite a useful thing for me because every time my thoughts get carried away and I'm calling my boss and saying something I've just exaggerate and just got into a spiral of like how bad it could become which is what anxiety is it's the fear irrational fear very often of things that might happen in the future and I've actually shared that scenario with him and he'll say just snow snow PR and it just brings it straight back down again and it's so it's my kind of safe word I guess to just remind myself how to just switch my thought pattern into a kind of positive one rather than a negative one so once you have got an example like that try and capture it into a word so it becomes something that you can remind yourself of I guess we have talked about trying to think more positively about ourselves and I think when we're being really critical of the way we perform or the way we feel we perform something we're lacking is being compassionate for ourselves and forgiving ourselves and I guess for me the thing that a little trick that I've that made it easier for me to practice being compassionate with myself was practicing the compassion I wanted to give to myself on others not to say that I wasn't compassionate to others I hope I was but it was to make like a conscientious thing of it to be like okay so one thing I really panic about which is a bit strange because I I'm either really late or really early but I'm bad at time management and I know that and I beat myself up about it but then what I noticed I did is when other people were bad at time management I kind of got annoyed with them as well and so I thought no if somebody is late I'm going to think you know maybe they're having a bad day Mr. Bass somebody bumped into them they helped an old lady across the road made all the excuses for them and then when they came in I gave them a warm welcome and if they were looking stressed it was a case of like I hope you're well it's okay sit down whatever and by practicing those little efforts of compassion with other people I was actually then able to practice that compassion within myself so for me that was really useful I guess what I wanted to ask as one of the final questions on this panel is when a loved one is going through that because so far we talked about how to cope when you are going through that when your loved one is going through that when your best friend is going through that what can you do to help you mentioned compassion and that's probably like one of the main roles one of the things that we should be doing but how do you support a person who's in despair how do you support a person who's so deep inside their head that they don't even know that they need help I spoke to my friend yesterday and my best friend she lives in Europe so I only see her every couple of months and the last time I saw her was around Christmas period and she was her own self and then she messaged me yesterday and she told me that her partner has been trying to convince her for a year to go and seek professional help and she finally went to a psychiatrist and now she's in meds and that was such a surprise to me because I didn't even know and I'm sure it was so difficult for her partner to be the only person who could try to support her for that I would like to ask what do you do when you're in this very lonely place when you're the only caregiver or a person supporting a person who's going through a very difficult time I think the person who's giving the support could do with some support as well because sometimes when a person is in the process of a low thing when you just tell them out-blank suggest to them out-blank why not you go seek some help usually it's a no because nobody wants to say that something's wrong with me they don't want to consider that so even healing when they choose to heal whether when they look at the problem it has their own pacing it has their own opening before they would consider that so if you are the one who has to support someone so my suggestion is find some support for yourself first right and so when the other party has that opening then there's time to go as a true occupational therapist my advice is going to be activity related so going back to talking about sometimes we get into bad habits or bad routines that might not be that healthy without even talking about the issues that person might be facing we can always invite them to do like a healthy or habituate a healthy thing so every Friday let's go for a swim together or on the weekends we're going to go and go for a walk or do something that is like a healthy behavior related and by doing these things by engaging in these things that allows us to kind of switch off reflect see things from a different perspective is those times when we can slowly start developing a little bit of insight about ourselves and just like you were mentioning you can't push anybody to do anything they don't want to do and if they don't have insight as well that's a very unfair thing to try and ask somebody to do as well so it's about how can we encourage them to have those reflective moments and help them develop that insight and a really relaxed and comforting like caring way so activities, fun things I guess from a personal perspective just being completely non judgmental when they do open up or in any capacity and also like I've mentioned about anxiety it's quite often tiny trivial things like snow pier that are actually just symptomatic of a much bigger kind of whirlwind that's going on so I think not trivializing whatever it is that they open up to you about because it is a cumulative thing that they're dealing with from personal experience when I wasn't feeling very well my two really good friends kept on texting me asking me how are you that really annoyed me to know and I was just like so asking me how I feel I actually feel horrible but I don't want to talk about it but what did work was they kept on sending me interesting articles like fun shows to watch they showed they cared by recognizing what I love and then sharing with me those things that I love to do but I think one of the big things is as a person who has a loved one that's going through something we know that there's something wrong we're very well aware that we just want to lie in bed for 12 hours and watch friends on repeat and literally have the covers over our head and not eat and not drink anything and just breathe and just be there but what is helpful is when you finally want to actually say something and they just sit there and they don't try to find solutions they don't try to tell you that it's going to be okay soon just listen now that and the activities they come in time but I think at the very beginning it's just about recognizing maybe that person just needs their space check in see if they want like I know with one of our friends when he was feeling really down we used to just drop off food at his front door and so we knew that he was picking up the food because the food would go missing the following morning that's the only way we knew that and the fact that there was another empty bottle of gin at the front door it's a different story but at the end of the day food parcels just dropping a text seeing if the blue ticks turn up little things like that they're okay but they just need time and when they're ready they're going to come and talk to you but just let them know that you're there and that you care I think that's a more that's my perspective we've got a lot of good tips, advices a lot of perspectives from a professional level to in a corporate or professional space we just want to open the floor up and ask if anyone has any questions it's a safe space don't worry about it if you have any questions for yourself or for on behalf of anyone please feel free to raise your hand and just ask away yeah we can also do we'll have a networking session after this if you're not very comfortable we can talk one to one as well we've got our professionals here they'll be around for a while more and we can have a conversation with them if you're more comfortable with that question I have a request for the panel from one of my co-workers she's wondering and actually I think I'm asking on behalf of a lot of people how to deal with specific triggers like difficult people in the workplace are there any techniques or approaches that you recommend when it comes to dealing with people or specific things in the workplace that might be causing you stress I guess it depends what capacity they're difficult but I think deep down everybody at work they're all there to do a job and they all want to do their job well and I think it comes down to trying to understand that person because there's something that is clashing or conflicting but I mean what I've usually done when I have those issues in the workplace is I offer to take the person for coffee and usually that surprises them because they're a bit like why would you want to spend time with me or whatever the way it usually results in us finding some common ground and everybody's got some form of common ground and I think when we're really busy and stressed there might have been a moment when you were short with them and they're just somebody that hangs on to stuff and that's okay because people that hang on to stuff are out there, I'm one of them and there are some people that are like oh you should just let things go and it's about understanding that you're that kind of person and that's okay and I'm this type of person and that's also okay but it's about creating that environment where that can happen when I've taken people for a coffee I've actually just explained to them we're not getting on on the wards and I really want to get on with you because I value you as a clinician for example and I think we could work really well together but we're obviously not working well together what can we do? sometimes it is a case of I just don't like you and I don't want to work with you well then we can both go to management and tell them that together it's really hard and I guess it requires you to be a little bit vulnerable and say this is where I'm at but also it requires you to be prepared with your compassion backpack to be able to take that firing because they might be horrible to you because you've done something that upset them and you didn't mean to upset them but you might need to acknowledge that and they also maybe immediately or through time need to learn to acknowledge that they've upset you too and so I guess it's like a work in process there's no easy way to answer that but from the standpoint of the person that's trying to make that effort is to try and understand why that person's being like that and more often than not you find out that I had another case of work a different person they were being increasingly challenging to work with so it turned out her husband was having heart problems and she was a difficult person when her husband wasn't having heart problems and she was even more difficult and that really made me think and I offered a hand of support and she says thanks but no thanks and the relationship changed so we're all human we're all good on the inside it's just finding where our common ground is and yeah it's tough I think quite often a big source of stress for those who are in consultancies is clients unfortunately where it is a transactional relationship because they are paying you to make you anxious or whatever I'm not sure I really have a solution to it but I think the most important thing is to with clients at least you can kind of maybe move them around the agency so I had one client who triggered one of my panic attacks who I he just caused me enormous anxiety so I just I had to say to my boss I cannot work with this man I just can't I have to be working on something else or to have something between me and him so that I don't have the daily connection with him and I think quite a lot of it is about looking into you as well and saying why is this person making me feel anxious or stressed or under pressure and trying to work out what's within you and whether there is a kind of pattern within yourself that you can change rather than attempting to change them and I think also just being really open with your colleagues and with your bosses can be something structurally changed if that person really is causing quite severe anxiety or depression or issues sorry one other thing I think clients feel that they can invade you in all directions now and wherever you can really try and own your time and your space and kind of make sure that WhatsApp if you can isn't a channel for your clients so try and make it really clear which channels are on and which are off you've got a sense of control over your own space otherwise it feels incredibly invasive and that's what leads I think to some of the mental health issues I think what does help is there are moments where you're just kind of like especially when you're in client service and you genuinely feel that the person on the other line on the phone is just there to make your life hell she had a bad day or he had a bad day so now he's kind of rolling down on to you and you're like why are you really doing this on a Friday at 5.30 but I think I think that two things that kind of stand out with like amazing leaders especially amazing female leaders one is compassion and empathy and actually recognizing that the person on the other side is human being we have a tendency and this is the reason why wars happen this is the reason why relationships fall apart it's when you when you stick by your guns and say I'm always right you're always wrong and everything that you're saying is completely flawed because I do not like you you're just everything that you're saying is completely wrong however if you took it like a person who was fair and actually listened you changed the way that you're engaging because all of a sudden you're opening up and you're saying okay so why is it that you're approaching this conversation in an aggressive manner so you don't actually need to ask that question but then go back through the emails go back through the conversations the reason why your client might have been having a bad day is because maybe her boss or his boss has been coming after them and she or he does not understand how to answer that question so what they're coming to you as a consulting company is to say they're not going to come to you and say I don't know how to answer this what they're going to come to say to you is you know team leader A there's an explanation for this why is it that you haven't given it to me when actually what she's actually trying to say is this is the answer that they want I can't make it up and I don't know what to say so can you help me it's just a different way it's under different circumstances and also the second thing is being human the person on the other line is as stressed out as anxious as you are so if they're coming at you there is something going on in the back there are some people unfortunately who are just, you know, plain rude but you can't help it with that situation I don't know I have an interesting exercise usually it's done facilitated so now I'm going to do it I have a quickie version maybe you can try it will apply to some situations so when you meet a person who triggers you so don't focus so much on your own reaction in this case but just go and can you pinpoint what's that particular attribute or quality or maybe energy about the person that really rubs you the wrong way and in your own space your own little exercise space private space pick up that energy act it out yourself and ask where do I need this energy more in my life even a little bit for example a demanding client right so of course all the suggestion to build your own boundaries advocate for yourself is okay on point but this is one other thing can try where do I need to be more demanding in my life too okay so like what I said the disturb is actually the good news coming to you is trying to wake you up to new attributes about yourself right so you learn so that universe send this person to you to learn how to be more demanding stand for yourself pick up the energy practice so you will find your own expression of this quality so don't worry that you will end up as nasty as this person okay it will not happen you will integrate this quality you will express it in your own way and have fun with it in your life and see what happens and what you can do with it any other questions from whoop let's say personality wise your mix of empathic and logical and as an empathic person you naturally absorb a lot of energy and people's reactions and then it affects your productivity how would you suggest in compartmentalizing and being able to focus in those moments okay for clients who are empathic okay because I work with people like that you have to learn to establish your own mechanism to shut the empathic channels down so maybe you can ask is this really my problem do I really need to take this on so at least have that chart point so that you can control whether I should be open to this or I just I can be relaxed and just close it and deflect back to the person you still can be your caring empathic in that sense like care for them but you do not need to absorb that okay so this will require a little bit of work to establish that boundary for yourself I recently was reading a nice little visualization you can use for something like this where you breathe in take a big deep breath in and you imagine you're absorbing everything like a dark smoky cloud that's inside you you turn it into a glowing ball of light and then when you breathe out it's like blue white light that you're breathing at sounds like fairy tale or unicorn or I've been yeah but if you try it and nobody's watching maybe and you actually try and do the visualization it can give you that feeling that you're having taking control of it so you're naturally going to absorb it anyway maybe that's how you feel and then you're also able to internalize it and bring it back in a positive way so yeah hippy stuff we have time for a few more questions just a quick interruption I think Mira has to make a move she's got a conference call work calls as usual thank you Mira so back to our questions I think there was a question in the front was there one more so if asking for help requires some degree of vulnerability how can we encourage vulnerability in the workplace especially when usually you're kind of pressured to look strong and you have your shit together basically but vulnerability will kind of make other people realize that you don't have your shit together all the time so how do we encourage that more in the workplace I think forums like this for people to speak out in offices is a really great place to start and having people senior people I think opening up first gives other people permission to follow I think it's in some ways unreasonable to expect that it's going to be bottom up I think it really has to be led from the top so making sure that leaders have a safety net and feel comfortable amongst their board members and then also that there's a kind of support system for people to open up I presume a lot of people have already watched the phenomenal TED Talk about vulnerability it's absolutely beautiful but I think TED Talk quite often helped prompt fresh discussions and different articles and kind of actively sharing things on the topic I think can really help as well because people digest things in different ways I think it's also having a healthy conversation or a healthy attitude towards mental health itself this is a bit more philosophical but it's coming from everybody have its ups and downs I don't care you are a junior or you're somewhere out there as a CXX everybody has gone through that and it's normal so vulnerability is one word but I also prefer the word simply being open that we're just being human and to have an open conversation about that because vulnerability also have the slant that you know you're being weak it has the connotation so maybe openness would be something that's more neutral more inviting for people to simply talk about no we are human beings so think about workplace is for the longest time it's operating like a piece of machinery we need to be optimised we need to be great and perfect and so I really hope for the workplace is that humanity can begin to come in we are seen as human beings running the ship and not piece of nuts and bolts that's making the thing function I think also leading by example which is what you're mentioning about it being good to have somebody at the top who's kind of saying I am vulnerable and it's okay I think all of us can go in and be like these are my boundaries and I don't talk to clients or whoever on WhatsApp after that time and I think when you go out and you have the strength to show your weakness because it's not actually a weakness vulnerability isn't a weakness it's a word that I guess we tag to weakness in some way but it is openness and we're not super human and we're not robots and we don't work 24 hours and we can't run off rubbish food and no sleep and we kind of live in a bit of a society that tells us if we do that and we do that really well we get a load of money and some people do and they're really unhappy or some of them might be really happy but I think the bottom line is to just practice being open with people and if you're having a bad day you know when it will become infectious that's the idea that when you're having a bad day you can say to someone hey I'm having a bad day today this is what I'm going to do ABC and D is it okay if you help me out with this or whatever or if you're in a meeting you let somebody know I'm not going to be very vocal today I'm going through this or whatever and I think it's about having that openness and I think sometimes we fear that because we worry about people abusing it they think like oh if I'm too some people are going to be like oh I'm mental health day and I guess it's better for us to get there and then have that discussion rather than to use that as an excuse not to get there so yeah I think being open and being able to have those conversations with your boss and if people throw it back in your face that's okay because you've planted that seed and the next time someone says it to them they might think about it a little bit further so even if it doesn't go the way we want in the first try there's always going to be more and more efforts towards it so many more questions we'll just do a couple more because we would like some time for networking as well Hi, first of all, can you hear me? Hi, I just want to say thank you for sharing all the stories and your own personal accounts of what happened to you as well so for me, my name is Antoinette and I've been in the media industry for about nine years so similar to you I've seen my other colleagues also have panic attacks and we could not help them so the only solution was to send them to Raffles Hospital because that's the only place that was next in line available but that was $400 for a one hour session to just give them some help so for me I'm actually developing my own early intervention app and I would really like to share that with you when it's ready for beta just to get your initial feedback and to see where I can improve on it it will be ready in July but just your initial feedback will be great to see how I can improve it especially for the Singapore market because I think we really need it That's it, thank you That's really cool, all the best with your initiative Hi, my name is Zee I think Singaporean or maybe people that work in Singapore is really very stressful where the anxiety attack is very common so I'm actually in the aroma I mean essential oil business where I dealing with few clients where they admit of their anxiety happen to them and they did have some taking some drugs probably I mean the medicine from the doctor to control so what is your cake aroma therapy because when you share this situation happen to them especially at midnight they can be like suddenly wake up for anxiety for nothing really nothing then pumping very fast and so because I studied the essential oils and I just recommend them some of the things that they can help them and eventually for the times being like few months down to the road and they really reduce the reliance on the medicine so what is your take for the therapist for dealing with these people I'm sure aroma therapy is one of the very good way and natural way to help this group of people just want to hear your feedback So I will say not the founder of my school does whatever works for the person is the medicine I've hung out with aromatherapies so I mean if you believe in herbal medicine aromatherapy is also an extension of using plants so there must be active components so if it works for the person it works I agree that's pretty retro and I think as well different things will work for different people and it can be down to what you enjoy and aroma therapy can be creative you know you're like exploring what different smells you like what you can mix and things like this and we all know like about the placebo effect the placebo effect is a thing and if it works it works I mean it's great and if it makes you feel better if it changes the way you perceive things if it gives you the perception that you have more control therefore you're more equipped to deal with certain situations then that works and anything to get you know people off medication if they're not comfortable taking it is a win so yeah you don't like aromatherapy? hey I guess any more questions oh okay I think one last question thank you I'm coming a bit from the other side I actually do suffer from clinical depression I've been treated for it for five years I even went through electroshock therapy cue the guest um I'm in a little bit of a slightly different industry I'm a financial advisor oh good no one's run away yet okay if you didn't know it's euphemism for insurance so I do have clients who come to me and they do suffer from mental health issues and I always try to be really open because I've been through all that and I never shy away from telling them I'm sorry I just wonder if I am sharing too much like you know am I coming to them with this like mental health agenda and scaring them away potentially like if that's happening to my clients and you know what about in the workplace am I also emitting that kind of too strong of a mental health come talk to me kind of aura you know is that even possible so you're just to clarify your question it's about by your word or you're asking if by being too open you might be pushing people away is that it I would say even if you are keep being open because at the beginning of these movements where we move towards further inclusivity you know the reason we're moving is because we're moving away from something we're moving away from the ignorance so naturally that is still going to be something that is faced in society but it's keeping that conversation going and I commend you for being able to be honest and to be able to say that to them because every person that you say that to even a person that shies away from you they might be going through that but they just don't know how to face the public with it yet and their social their socially created behavior towards people like themselves it's a shy away because that's what their mother told them to do or their grandmother told them to do even though they're dealing it with themselves so I think it's to have the faith that by being able to be open about it in the way that you are and thank you for sharing it today it shows people that A there is hope when you are suffering from such a condition that you can sustain a stressful job you can maintain a good career you can take care of yourself you can be articulate you can be a human being that nobody would guess there was anything wrong with you, wrong with you there's nothing wrong with you and I think that's really important that's really important to see because when people we were talking about how the media has either intentionally or unintentionally portrayed certain conditions you know you are doing the opposite of that you are giving the other end of the spectrum and I think that's a really powerful thing to do and if people have that strength I would 100% encourage them to use that and support each other and I think it's even great waffling on sorry is when there is somebody that's open to that discussion people that don't know much about it might feel that they can come to you and ask that question so for example not so much about mental health but when I first came to Singapore I had lots of questions about Islam so it's practiced differently I think although the way it seems to be practiced differently is different to Singapore rather than England and I sort of was worried that it might be a touchy issue so I kind of just ignored it but I respected it but I just kind of ignored it and then I had a colleague who would speak openly but non pushy about her faith and she was somebody that I could actually go up to and say hey can I ask you about Islam because I don't get it and I've heard this and that contradicts that and I could actually be open with her and she was able to calmly talk me through her views about it and not get offended and I think that's really powerful as well if somebody can come to you and say but aren't depressed people just lazy because for you that's that moment where you're like this is a point where a person's interested and I've got their attention and I can educate them and that's really meaningful so good job okay so I guess we're gonna wrap it up I just wanted to say that listen to your body and if you have a pain in your back or if you have trouble breathing it might be something that you want to talk about with your doctor so it might be physical it might be something anxiety induced go to your doctor speak to a professional seek help there's nothing wrong with you but sometimes we just cannot overcome certain things ourselves and we need some additional help right we need a friend all of us thank you to our panelists now I would like to invite Sarah well okay our volunteer to share a few words about our social event right thank you Marta thank you to all of you for your insights tonight so just so that everybody knows every alternate month she says puts together a social night where all of us can get together network make friends and just on the back of tonight's event I think it's a good thing that we have this next month where all of you can build your own support system with the she says girls over here we all know now what we need to do as a collective society to move together to build a mentally healthy environment for everybody and I think you can make use of the social night that we have next month to kind of build that society more details will be up soon just check out our facebook page we'll let you know on the location time and the date and just you know just come down and have fun and make friends right thank you so now we have a short time we have the space so we can network if there's anyone you want to talk to you can go ahead and talk to if you want to talk to our professionals you can ask them any questions that you have so we'll be hanging around for a while more so feel free to chat to have some snacks some brain food and just to relax for a bit so thank you for tonight and can we have a round of applause so absolutely we need to get our selfie together with all the crowd our traditional she says selfie