In conversation with series

July 13, 2021 – Asha Zappa

Mental health safety and accessibility at work: Psychosocial risk from the perspective of lived experience

The framework of mental wellbeing existing on a spectrum that we all travel up and down has been around for a number of years, with thriving being one end and mental illness at the other end.  But ask anyone with the lived experience of a diagnosed mental ill health condition, and they would tell you that this isn’t the case. That a person can be living with a mental illness and thrive, and that actually, the opposite of strong mental wellbeing is not mental illness, but rather, mental distress, and that mental distress can be experienced by anyone regardless of what their diagnosis is or is not.

In this session, I sit down with Asha Zappa, the WayAhead Mental Health Promotion Manager to learn about how traditional workplace wellbeing initiatives might unintentionally be excluding people with mental illness, what accessibility looks like and why and how listening to people with lived experience is the best way to codesign effective workplace wellbeing strategies

May 20, 2021 – Professor David Perkins

Regional communities face unique challenges when it comes to workplace mental health. There is the simple fact of being large distances from services and the diversity of what constitutes a workplace. Then there are all the recent specific challenges of drought, bush fires, COVID 19 and floods that have devastated communities. Steph talks to Professor David Perkins from the Centre for Rural and Remote Mental Health about how these unique challenges impact the mental health of communities and what are some ways communities have healed in the face of all this adversity (and much more)

December 1, 2020 – Dr Michelle Lim

As we come to the end of a year that has distanced us from each other further than ever before, what can workplaces do to support their employees?

Dr Michelle Lim, the chair of Ending Loneliness Together, is joining us to share the latest insights into workplace loneliness and its impact on wellbeing. We’ll also be chatting about how to maintain healthy relationships in an everchanging work environment while managing the current public health crisis.

July 15, 2020 – Financial Advice Matters

Learn how to take control of your financial wellbeing, and how organisations can better support their employees, as we speak with Darren Smith and Francis Rigby from Financial Advice Matters.

We know that financial worries can have a significant impact on people’s mental health. In this half-hour chat, we speak with two financial wellbeing experts to better understand what individuals can do, and how their workplaces can help them, to feel more empowered about their finances.