Introduction
RUOK Day is on Thursday 11 September this year (2025). Each year it triggers the same concern in me. The idea of the day is powerful but those who are asked to be prepared to ask whether a workmate, friend or family member is feeling okay may not have a comfortable sense of what psychological stress or distress might be.
This dimension of our wellbeing has long been dominated by the idea of ‘mental’ health or ‘mental’ illness. While there is a persistent dogma that insists that being human is something only psychiatrists understand, there is a strong and growing self-care, self-awareness, self-management movement.
I grew up at a time when emotions were dismissed as signs of weakness – fit only for children and women. It really wasn’t until the late 1960s that this mindset began to change. But it still took a few more decades before thinking about emotions became popular. I read Daniel Goldman’s Emotional Intelligence shortly after it was published in 1995. Now, a quick search of Amazon throws up over 50 offerings on the theme of emotional intelligence.
Research into organizational behaviour and leadership has produced a rich source of content that emphasises the critical value of self-awareness and personal accountability.
There are over 50 podcasts on psychology, as well as YouTube videos and who knows how much else on other social media (which I don’t use).
However, it doesn’t matter how much content is around if people don’t engage with it and don’t become comfortable enough to reach out to somebody in need.
The line
Toward the end of my time as a disability ERG lead, I became concerned about what members with diagnoses of depression were telling me about the stigma they felt. I wanted to do something to ‘change the conversation’. In early 2020 I started working with the Global Leadership Foundation (GLF) on what became a pilot program we called Getting Above the Line (GATL). It had promise as a means of helping people become more aware of their emotional reactions by giving them a simple tool rather than a psychological theory.
The GATL program consisted of 4 1-hour sessions held over Teams or Zoom. It introduced the Personal Responsibility model and then explored how to use it.
The line refers to an idea that there are states of emotion where we feel in control and states where we are not. It’s called ‘the line of choice’. Above it we accept personal responsibility for our behaviour. Below it we blame, defend, deny and justify. Below are the elements of a scale, with my rephasing). So, above the line, in ascending order there are – recognition(awareness and ownership), social value (positive constructive response), wisdom (insight) and presence (above it all). Below the line, in descending order, are – automated responses (negative and reflexive), exaggeration (blowing things out of proportion), survival (just hanging in), preoccupation (can’t let it go) and delusion (self-justification and denial of any responsibility).
Rephrasing is a useful exercise because it’s a measure of the extent to which you acknowledge that these are the stages we go through.
I like the GLF’s essential themes, and I especially like the idea of emotionally healthy leadership. There has been a lot of research into leadership in the past decade or so emphasizing the importance of self-awareness and personal accountability. Leadership is a useful theme because it applies to situational leadership rather than just formal roles. Leadership includes a capacity for empathy and the need to create psychologically safe settings for others.
In fact, the failed NSW government’s Age of Inclusion campaign from 2020 had a manifesto which envisioned that leaders would “inspire with self-awareness and empathy”. Unfortunately, nobody thought to add those capabilities to team leaders’ and managers’ role requirements – which was a great pity.
In the context of Disability Inclusion, I prefer organizational leadership texts because they are a well-structured, data driven, and actionable guide to relational and situational self-awareness and personal accountability. Others may prefer guidance of the self-help or spiritual variety. The point is that there are essential insights that are the foundation of self-managing one’s emotions. It really isn’t effective to reach out to others if you haven’t that vital insight into your own capacity to be aware of and regulate emotions.
The GLF has a nice little free booklet, Emotional Health and Leadership. You can download it here.
My hope with GATL was to have facilitators trained so the program could be run across my department. But 2020 wasn’t a great time for innovation, even though the need for help to stay above the line was urgent.
What the data tells us
In Australia 23% of people with disability say their primary disability is psychological. Anxiety and depression are by far the most common diagnoses. Aside from those with formal diagnoses there are many people whose lives are influenced by stress and worry – whether at work or in one’s private life.
In the 12 months prior to the Australian Mental Health and Wellbeing study (2020-2022), the most common mental illnesses in Australia were:
- Anxiety disorders (3.4 million people, or 17% of the population)
- Affective disorders (1.5 million, or 8%) (depression etc)
- Substance Use disorders (650,000, or 3%)
Psychotic disorders are found in only .5% of the population. So, the most common ‘mental illness’ we encounter is anxiety – something we all know at various times. Depression seems to be the next most common – also something most of us have encountered.
The lived experience
I have no doubt that some people do get into situations where they can’t switch off an emotional response and clinical intervention is the best option. But we so mistrust our emotions that we are prepared to surrender normal emotional responses to clinicians who need to make a living. Some years back I read an article lamenting the way that normal and natural grief was being treated as a disorder by doctors. Not everyone acts in our best interests.
We need to remember that we are heirs to a wide spectrum of emotions, and sometimes our natural capacity for resilience is overwhelmed or impaired. We need help. But this is help that should come from friends and family – and would, if they hadn’t been disempowered by being convinced being human isn’t something we can’t figure out for ourselves.
People with clinically diagnosed conditions are put in a bind. What starts out as an act of self-care can end up being a source of shame. I have been told how the fact of having been given a diagnosis becomes a stigma. One person told me that they disclosed they had a diagnosis of depression to their manager because they did need some accommodation because of a significant personal event. Prior to the disclosure they were trusted to work with little close supervision. But afterwards not only did supervision suddenly increase but their judgement was questioned as never before. Efforts to discuss these changes with the manager were futile.
Back in the 1970s I worked in several psychiatric hospitals. I later worked in Veterans Affairs, where, in the process of preparing summaries of clinical evidence for tribunal hearings, I read and summarised countless psychiatric reports. In subsequent years I worked with accommodation services whose residents were former psychiatric hospital patients. I have long felt comfortable with the idea of mental illness, and this is why I don’t think the term suits people who have experienced emotional distress.
I understand how mental illness has been represented in our community and why any suggestion of it might make a manager, indeed anybody, might react badly. We need to reclaim our right to our experience of the lows as well as the highs of being human without ‘expert’ intervention (unless we ask for it or it is deemed really necessary).
Conclusion
My concern about RUOK day is that it is one day of the year. That’s okay for birthdays, Christmas and Fathers’ Day (I got a very nice highland single malt). But RUOK should only be a reminder that we need to be developing our capability to be open and empathic as a fundamental capacity.
Almost 25% of people who say they have a disability have one relating to their psychological wellbeing.
But there’s more to that than just this. Disability can be traumatic. I spent 10 months in hospital after contracting GBS. I left with serious disabilities. I contracted GBS in April 2008 and come September 2025 I cannot recall anybody asking me how I was coping with such a catastrophic loss of ability. I am doing fine. Thanks for imagining that you have asked me.😊
I am a fan of the ‘Special Olympics’ but I do wish they’d change the name. I remember how ‘special needs’ decayed into the insult of being ‘special’. The performances are riveting to me because I know a little of where the athlete has had to come from. I am not inclined to emulate them because I am a nerd and sport isn’t my passion.
That said, I fear there is an unintentional misdirect going on. Olympic heroes with disabilities can create an illusion that all people with disabilities must be heroic. This isn’t a conscious thing, but it’s the kind of stereotyping that kicks in without us knowing.
For example, the 2020 Age of Inclusion campaign included a good reason for employing people with disabilities that was that they were good at problem solving because their disability meant they were good at navigating impediments in the world. No. Stop laughing. I am serious. This was real. It took me near 18 months to get it removed from the Public Service Commission website.
I suspect that some Olympians with disabilities process the trauma of the cause of their disability through dedication to their sport. If you get your lower leg blown off by an IED, becoming an Olympic level athlete makes sense. I write blogs on Disability Inclusion as a way of processing my trauma.
So, my point is that disability can carry its own sense of the visitation of an outage on one’s sense of personhood and cause grief, depression or anxiety. The heroic response is not appropriate for everyone. That’s a myth from a different time. We must be accepting of, and gentle to, ourselves and open, and inclusive of, the pain others experience in whatever hurts them.
To me RUOK day is a reminder for me to ask myself how okay I am to reach out and be a good friend to somebody in need of emotional succour.
And you?