‘What happened?’ ‘Has this happened to you before?’ ‘What did you do last time?’ ‘What worked?’ ‘Is there something I can do to help you?’

“Wouldn’t it be amazing if we asked the same questions about mental health?” Barbara ponders. “‘I don’t understand what’s going on for you. Tell me about it.’”

Barbara Brennan raises awareness about mental health in her native Ireland and internationally, having worked for the NGO See Change and now independently as a public speaker and workshop facilitator, specialising in workplace wellbeing. Using analogies like the IT consultant, she encourages people to have better quality conversations to reduce fear and stigma surrounding mental health.

Like MOVE Congress keynote speaker Dominique de Marné, Barbara commands the stage in a warm and impactful manner as a Change Maker, Stigma Disruptor and Mental Health Advocate who draws on her own lived experience of surviving suicide attempts and battling severe mental illness for 15 years.

“When I was 15 to almost 30, I did not expect to be a national leader on mental health in my country,” she notes. “And I certainly did not expect to speak internationally and be considered an expert in my area. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t go to college. And yet, I am one of the voices that is helping to change my country around mental illness.”

Disrupt stigma by breaking the silence
Having experienced stigma in the workplace on her road to recovery, Barbara discovered that stigma stems from unconscious bias and assumes that the person has a reduced capacity and will not get better, which can have an unfairly detrimental impact on their careers. Stigma is also fuelled by a misunderstanding of “mental health” in our communities.

“[Mental health is] not an absence of disorders,” she says. “When we say the words mental health, people assume it’s mental illness. We’re starting to understand the spectrum, that mental health is good health, it’s bad health and every step in between.”

She believes that stigma is also a manifestation of fear about how to approach someone who is struggling with their mental health. That’s why she urges colleagues and friends of sufferers to break the silence (“silence is powerful”) and take a practical approach, reminding them that they do not need to provide solutions and that listening is as important as asking the right questions.

“Most often when somebody talks to us, they don’t want an answer from us. They don’t want guidance. They don’t want us to fix them, because they’re not broken anyway. They want you to listen. That’s why we have two of those [ears] and one of those [mouth], because we should listen twice as much as we speak.”