A Public Relations Podcast: Smoke Signal Episode 22 - Mental Health and Wellbeing in PR: Setting minimum standards

Smoke Signal, A Public Relations Podcast

We all have mental health – it is not a thing that only a few people have. It is both good and bad, it’s on a spectrum, everyone will have good days and bad days and we will all be touched by it. And the fact that we are all touched by it, means we need to stop treating it like a taboo subject and be able to have better conversations to improve mental health in our industry,” Andy Wright.

Andy Wright is co-chair of the Mentally Healthy Change Group – founded by a group of leaders from across the creative, marketing and media sector. Its aim is to de-stigmatise mental health as a topic of discussion and help facilitate the conversation between leaders in the industry and employees.

The Mentally Healthy Change Group evolved from a survey of over 1800 workers across the creative, media and marketing sectors – the biggest study ever done into mental health in the sector – which found 56% were displaying mild to severe levels of depression and 55% were displaying mild to severe levels of anxiety.

To help set the sector on the right path, the Healthy Change Group recently released a set of minimum standards to put a line in the sand. Since being launched, 45 businesses and agencies have signed up – including Facebook, Edelman and Havas to name a few. In our discussion, Andy describes the goal of the minimum standards as two- fold – to bring the topic of mental health front of mind for employers and a framework for employees to raise issues if they feel they are not being delivered on.

Andy shares his three for the media, creative and marketing sector:

1. A lot of businesses will say their people are their most important asset – I wish we would actually believe that and treat them like your most important asset
2. The industry starts to address some of the systemic issues – the client-agency relationship dynamics and the ways of working that are peculiar to our sector
3. We can treat mental health like we do mental health – take away the stigma of having a day off because you need to rest or recover, just as if my back is really bad.

In this episode we also the #threewishes from Edelman’s Michelle Hutton; Nicky Young – Group Managing Director of MullenLowe salt; Karen Van Bergan – CEO of Omnicom Public Relations Group; Arwa Husain from India’s largest independent PR agency – Adfactors; and Jo Hooper, founder of Mad and Sad Club.