‘Being open about my experience has not held back my career. If anything, it’s enhanced my relationship with my colleagues and clients.’
In 2015 Herbert Smith Freehills pension partner Samantha Brown suffered a depressive episode. She returned to work after three months, but found herself off again because she had not fully recovered. Brown eventually returned to practise as a partner at the firm.
I was quite unwell in 2015.Before that I’d been blinkered about it myself. I thought that a mental health programme was a really good idea but that it wouldn’t ever be relevant to me.
It took me an awfully long time to appreciate I was unwell. I wrapped it all up with the idea that ‘I am a junior partner; I work in the City; this is really high pressure’, and I put more pressure on myself.
I ended up being off work for three months. I came back for a bit, and I was keen to come back, but I obviously wasn’t ready and I’d lost some confidence. Then I had a further spell off and came back the second time with a completely different mindset and approach.
I had an open dialogue with the firm about what I could do. For me, taking ownership and doing work, even on a reduced basis, was what I needed to do for my own recovery.
You can’t expect people to fix it for you. You’re the only person who knows how you feel in your own head. What worked for me may not work for others, but we want to encourage people in similar circumstances to have an open dialogue with us and explore what might work for them.
It can be much easier in this kind of environment to say ‘let’s close our eyes and keep focused on the billable hour’ but that can be so counterproductive. People can become disengaged or more unwell. We cannot prevent mental illness, but we should try to manage in a more compassionate way. If someone was physically unwell you wouldn’t ignore it and hope it would go away, but mental health seems to be a bit messier.
Being open about my experience has not held back my career. If anything, it’s enhanced my relationship with my colleagues and clients. It opens up conversations in areas that you never thought you’d talk to people about in a professional environment. It has helped turn relationships from anonymous adviser and anonymous client into relationships between individuals. It has helped to humanise interactions. I get so much more out of my work-based relationships now than I ever used to.
I have been quite open about my experience. There are several reasons for that. One is that being engaged and advocating for awareness helps my own wellbeing. Another is that I have met brilliant, bright people at the outset of their careers who are suffering from or have experience of mental health issues and who have said that they are too afraid to speak about their circumstances for fear of it having a detrimental impact on their career prospects.
That just does not seem right. Not only might it be difficult, constraining and limiting for the individual, but being entirely candid and commercial about it, there is every chance that organisations miss out on great people because they select-out, out of fear as to how they will be received, or indeed whether they will be given a chance at all. As leaders we can do something about this. We can work to create workplaces that are driven and high performing, but at the same time are open and compassionate. I believe very firmly that we should lead by example in this respect. That doesn’t necessarily mean all speaking about our own experiences; not everyone will want to do that. But I do think that it means listening and creating a culture where it is safe to speak.