Mental health and agency life
What does mental health mean for us at the Havas Lynx Group? By its very nature, life working at a busy, successful agency is intense: short deadlines and the constant strive for perfection. We push our clients, our work, and ourselves to the limit – fuelled by the need to do good and do better.

But, it’s not sustainable. For our minds, it’s like running a hatchback on rocket fuel – it works for a while, but eventually it’s more energy than it can handle, and it burns out. It’s easy to see how, in an industry like ours, mental health concerns like stress are becoming even more prominent.

It can be difficult to admit to yourself that you’re struggling with poor mental health. It’s harder still to admit it to your loved ones. Perhaps most challenging of all is acknowledging mental health issues at work.

Stigma is a tricky ghost to fight. Nearly 9 out of 10 people with mental health problems say that stigma and discrimination have a negative effect on their lives. Even in 2019, in our world of constant connectivity and openness, it’s more likely that we’d share a selfie rather than our experience of poor mental health, for fear of being misunderstood or thought of as weak.

Put simply, our working life combined with the negative attitude towards mental health in society means that we all need to do better in understanding our mental health and taking positive steps towards managing it.

Managing mental health

At the Havas Lynx Group, we’re working to put mental health and wellness at the forefront of discussion. For Mental Health Awareness Week we organised a variety of activities to re-centre the way we think and talk about mental health. Obviously, our approach goes way beyond this.

We kick-started 2018 by unveiling our wellness strategy – as we continue on this journey, we hope to keep achieving helpful change for ourselves.