Most organisations now have a mental health policy. Many have trained mental health first aiders. And yet most employees still would not tell their manager if they were struggling. What is going wrong?
The gap between policy and culture
Over the past decade, mental health has moved firmly onto the workplace agenda. Awareness days, wellbeing programmes, employee assistance lines, trained first aiders. On paper, many organisations are doing a lot.
And yet survey after survey finds the same thing. The majority of employees who are struggling do not disclose it to their employer. They worry about being seen as unreliable, less capable, a liability. They manage the performance while the difficulty underneath grows.
The policy exists. The culture has not caught up. And the gap between the two is where people fall through.
Why culture is harder to change than policy
Culture in a workplace is not written down anywhere. It is the unspoken set of norms about what is acceptable, what is valued, and what is safe to show. It is built slowly through the behaviour of leaders, the responses to vulnerability, and the stories that circulate about what happens to people who put their hand up.
If the senior leadership team talks about resilience as the ability to push through without complaint, the culture communicates that struggling is weakness. If someone discloses a mental health difficulty and finds themselves quietly moved off a project shortly afterwards, the culture communicates that disclosure carries risk. If the mental health awareness day is treated as a box-ticking exercise, the culture communicates that no one is really paying attention.
Training people to have better conversations does not fix this on its own. Culture change requires something more fundamental: a shift in what leaders model, what is responded to with empathy, and what is genuinely normalised over time.
What the brain has to do with it
There is a neurological dimension to this that is worth understanding. When someone is considering whether to disclose a mental health struggle at work, their brain is running a threat assessment. What is the likely outcome? What is the risk to my status, my security, my relationships?
If the brain evaluates that disclosure carries social risk, it will activate a threat response. The person will not disclose. They will protect themselves. This is not irrational. It is the brain doing its job.
Creating conditions where people can talk about mental health requires reducing the perceived threat of doing so. That means consistent, visible signals from leadership. It means responses to disclosure that are warm and practical rather than awkward and distancing. And it means building genuine understanding throughout the workforce about what mental ill-health is and why it happens.
What actually shifts the needle
The organisations that make the most progress tend to share a few things in common.
Leaders talk openly about their own experiences. Not in a performative way, but honestly and with appropriate boundaries. This does more to change the felt culture than any policy document.
Managers are equipped not just with awareness but with practical knowledge. Understanding the basics of how the brain works under stress, why someone might go quiet or become reactive, what a supportive conversation actually looks and feels like. This changes how they respond in the moments that matter.
Peer support is invested in. Formal Employee Assistance Programmes are underused partly because calling a helpline feels clinical and exposing. Peer supporters, people within the workforce who have been trained and are visibly available, reduce the barrier considerably.
The role of education
One of the most consistent findings from Jamma Wellbeing’s work across sectors is that understanding reduces stigma. When people learn about how the brain processes threat, why emotions arise, and why mental ill-health is not a personal failing but a human experience, something shifts.
They become less afraid of their own experiences. They become more understanding of others. They become more willing to have the conversations that the policy always said they should be having.
Talking about mental health at work is hard partly because it feels abnormal. Education, properly delivered, begins to make it feel normal. And normality is the foundation that everything else is built on.