At its core, mental health inclusion is about creating workplaces where we normalize discussing mental health challenges and work to interrupt the stigma and biases attached to mental health issues. When we do this, we create organizational cultures that are better able to support all team members’ wellness, which can have a direct impact on team contentment, engagement and performance.
At bci, we’re known for curating and delivering practical mental health inclusion programming that facilitates a more sophisticated understanding of mental health challenges, builds greater capacity for holding meaningful and inclusive mental health conversations and helps to embed wellness and psychological safety within organizational cultures.
bci has an exclusive partnership with Dr. Komal Bhasin to curate and deliver targeted mental health inclusion programming for bci clients.
All of our programming can be rolled out as a single offering or can be delivered as part of a customized mental health program consisting of multiple modules. Our suite of programming includes both foundational sessions and targeted, in-depth explorations of mental health inclusion that will allow your organization to foster, support and prioritize personal wellbeing within your teams.
At bci, we offer advisory services and expert guidance to organizations on how to embed mental health inclusion concepts within your processes and practices, in order to foster an open dialogue around mental health and wellness and to help you build the necessary infrastructure that reflects best practices in this space.
One of the biases around mental health, particularly in the U.S. and in Canada, is that we presume that we can label others — that it’s okay for us to choose the label we then apply to others. We foreground our perceptions and judgments over people’s personal preferences on how they want to be referred to and how they want to identify.
One of the best ways that we can foreground the person and not their illness, as well as recognize who the expert is and who has the most knowledge around their own mental health, is the very neutral language around experience.
So for example, rather than saying, “Neena has depression,” instead we might say, “Neena is a person with lived experience of depression.” The word “experience” can be really powerful.
We would love to share with you our in-depth and thoughtful approach to discussing mental health inclusion in the workplace and how you can break down barriers that currently exist when holding inclusive mental health conversations. If you are interested in learning more, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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