Friday, March 29, 2024

Be a nosey bugger

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Asking someone if they are okay is the first step to helping someone who may be quietly struggling but feels they can’t talk about it.
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If you are worried about someone’s mental health, then talk to them about it. 

It is a simple but vital piece of advice clinical psychologist Nigel Latta says can encourage people to get help for depression before it is too late.

“If you’re worried about someone, ask them. If you’re worried about a friend because you haven’t heard from them, ask them how they are doing,” Latta says.

“Just say to them, ‘How are you doing dude, I haven’t heard from you for a while, you’ve gone a bit quiet and I know you’ve got some really stressful stuff going on’.”

No one has ever killed themselves from asking those questions and while it was a scary question to ask, you should feel okay asking it, he said in a question-and-answer webinar organised by Dairy Business 360. 

“If you are feeling it could be something, then trust your instinct and ask the question,” he says.

If they then say that they are struggling, let them know that you understand how tough it is and it is normal to have those thoughts when feeling down – but acting on them was not normal.

Latta says people with depression and suicidal thoughts often have their brain convince themselves that it would be better off for everyone if they were not around.

“If you’re thinking that, it’s not true. What this will do is inflict a wound on people that they will carry around with them for the rest of their lives,” he says.

“If the only reason you can hang on and not do this to someone that you care about in your family, then don’t do it,” he says.

For some, this has kept them hanging on long enough until they get the help they need.

He says farmers needed to love their staff and accept it was their job to look after them and make sure they are okay – and if they are worried about them, ask them how they are doing.

“In 20 years of doing counselling stuff with people, there’s no clever wordy ways of saying stuff. It’s just you and this person sitting there having a chat,” he says.

Trust your gut and if your gut is telling you that a staff member is struggling, reach out to them.

“One of the jobs about being a good leader of people is noticing when things aren’t right and checking up on them,” he says.

“It’s good to be a nosey bugger.”

In terms of dealing with stress, Latta suggested a tip from the philosophy of stoicism – control the controllable. 

He says focusing only on the things you can control in times of stress was one of the most useful pieces of thinking.

“That’s my go-to stress management technique,” he says.

There are also really good websites to help people deal with anxiety and depression.

“If you’re really struggling, you have just got to ask someone for help and the first step would be to go to your GP,” he says.

There are a variety of good medications for depression that can help and the next step was finding someone to talk to help untangle any issues.

Latta was also asked on how to better connect with Generation Y and Z. He told listeners he did not subscribe to the stereotype of the younger generation being useless and self-entitled. 

Instead, they just wanted to be paid a decent amount and treated respectfully. In his younger days, Latta says he just kept quiet and put up with bullying behaviour from some bosses in terrible working conditions.

For employers with young staff, they had to be given a sense of autonomy and made to feel that their job is making a difference.

“If you want to have a team of motivated people that work hard, you have to have those things,” he says.

The culture of an employer’s work team was extremely important. It was the bedrock that many businesses are built on.

If bosses value creating that culture, he says they will be rewarded with loyalty and productivity.

He rubbished talk that the younger generation do not care. When the Christchurch earthquakes occurred, one of the biggest volunteer groups that helped out was the Student Volunteer Army.

Working on a dairy farm is not a job, it is a lifestyle and the dairy industry needs to sell that concept to people if it wants to attract people to the industry.

“It’s a way of living that you’re signing up for. It’s about trying to appeal to people looking for that and there will be people,” he says.

The industry also had to find its ‘why’.

“If it were me I would be thinking, ‘why are you a dairy farmer, why do you choose this life?’ That’s the stuff you should be pushing out to people,” he says.

Latta also believed people still thought it was farmers “wandering around in gumboots”.

“They have no idea of the complexity and just how interesting farming is,” he says.

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