Danielle Mik:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s Pearls of Wisdom. Today, we’re privileged to have Kathie Melocco with us talking about the challenges of mentally healthy workplaces and the impact on employees in particular when a workplace is unhealthy for them. So welcome, Kathie.

Kathie Melocco:

Thank you for having me, Danielle.

Danielle Mik:

My pleasure. Kathie’s the founder of WOW Chaplaincy, and WOW provides a non-religious first responder service to employees, sort of a form of a completely confidential EAP service. WOW’s got a variety of focuses, domestic and family violence, mental health, workplace harassment, bullying, et cetera. Kathie’s well versed on the impact of workplace trauma on individuals as she works with it every day, sadly, and Kathie’s currently focusing on a newly defined area of workplace injury that we call moral injury, and I’m really excited to have Kathie here to talk about that and anything else she wants to discuss today. So thank you for joining us, Kathie.

Danielle Mik:

Look, as we know, mental health is growing in significance all the time and it’s becoming part of our everyday discussions. Three quarters of people say mental health is a consideration in choosing a workplace when they apply for a job. So, that’s enormous. Half of people believe that employers should be doing more in this space, and we all know that there’s also an increasing look from the regulatory side on employers, that they should be doing more in this space and have more responsibility. We also know that research shows, like with PWC, that the investment in mentally healthy workplaces actually gives a return, a positive return of a dollar every $2.30 for employers. So they’ve got financial reasons to do it, but don’t yet seem to quite be onto it as much as they could be.

Danielle Mik:

I’d love to hear your views on moral injury and how employers can prevent it from occurring. Kathie, that’s a new term to many. How would you describe it? How would you define it?

Kathie Melocco:

Well, I mean the best way I describe it when I’m talking to people, moral injury is about being human and being injured as a human because your moral compass has been compromised. We all know the difference between right and wrong. We all have a sense of our own values, a sense of who we are, and sometimes we’re asked to do things that cause conflict to our moral compass. Sometimes we’re betrayed by an institution, and sometimes things happen that there is no explanation for. It was first identified by a psychiatrist called Jonathan Shay in the 1990s, 1994, when he noticed Vietnam veterans were coming back from Vietnam, he was working with them on PTSD and they weren’t recovering, and he couldn’t work out what was going on. Then he started to research literature, of all things, and he discovered that a moral compass, a sense of who, had been spoken about by philosophers and ethicist for centuries.

Kathie Melocco:

So he coined a term called moral injury, which is essentially the breaking of the self, and that’s where we’re at. Now, the reason, just to go on before we perhaps come back to your next question, the reason I was so interested it in this is because we work with so many victims at the coalface or targets at the coalface, and I see the rumination that goes on, the level of distress, the lack of organizational response, because moral injury is a leadership failure. I thought I’ve got to do something to help, because people are going into therapy, which is, there’s a really good place for all of this, but they’re not able to move forward. Particularly victims of, or targets of, workplace bullying and sexual harassment.

Kathie Melocco:

So I did my own research, and training as a chaplain that’s one of the things we talk about, because there’s now a multidisciplinary response to moral injury, which is really the first, if you want to talk about it as a mental health construct occurring. I discovered that some of the tools, and bearing in mind it’s early days, there’s early research. There’s not a lot of evidence yet, because we’re still in that process of collecting data and research. But some of the tools are about communal voice, about giving people voice to their experience and the failures that have happened, and we are seeing that everywhere at the moment.

Kathie Melocco:

Perhaps not constructed in a way that’s marching people in a direction for outcomes, but you’ve only got to look at the Grace Tame response, or the domestic and family violence sector, who are all screaming for help, and that help is not forthcoming. And similarly in aged care, which has a very vulnerable workforce, and I actually had parents that got COVID during the first wave in aged care, the first wave of COVID here. So I’ve seen that and I’ve seen what happens to primarily an unskilled workforce who aren’t paid very well and not given enough support and coping strategies.

Danielle Mik:

Yes. Kathie, do you think there are a set of common causes of moral injury, or do you think it’s very diverse?

Kathie Melocco:

Well, as I said, I mean, it’s often spoken about in the military, because people are asked to do things that, or things happen in a split second, and it takes them years to recover from, or it could be a leader, go and do this, and they do it.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Kathie Melocco:

The same in journalism. Journalism, they hear stories and they see things and they send people into war zones. It’s very common. As I said, in aged care. It’s essentially a betrayal. That’s the area that interests me. A betrayal of leadership or institutional response, and that’s what we’ve got to look at. All the fruit bowls in the world and yoga retreats is not going to solve this.

Danielle Mik:

Oh God, you’re stealing my lines. That’s what I always say. Yes, yes. They don’t solve the problem, do they?

Kathie Melocco:

It’s not going to solve this. We have to have a whole of organization response to looking after our people, and as much as it might be unsavory for some of your listeners to hear, having mental health programs, plans, all of those things, is all very well, but if you are not walking the talk as an organization, you’re going to injure people. We are in a situation, as we’re moving through COVID, that life is never going to return to what we knew. It’ll different version, and we’re assuming people are going to work at the level that they did in the way that they did after experiencing what they’ve experienced. I can tell you, when we encounter people through our chaplaincy, most people anecdotally have had five major trauma triggers during COVID. Could be deaths in families, could be loss of job, all sorts of things.

Kathie Melocco:

People are not coming out the other side as healthy individuals that are going to be able to work those hours, nor do they want to, and we’re noticing that with the Great Resignation, that meaning and purpose is becoming number one. And that’s really the reason why we establish WOW, which stands for World of Work, as a secular chaplaincy, because the skills of chaplaincy are about listening. We’re first responders and we refer people onto appropriate services. So mental health support, for example, I mean our little black book is gold. Absolutely gold. We rarely refer people onto mental health help lines, even though there’s a place for them and they’re very valuable, and we thank the organizations for their work. But very often you can’t get through, and you are on this merry-go-round. Our first port of call is to get them to help, and get them to help is often their GP.

Kathie Melocco:

Now, we’ve got a whole new situation emerging there with GPs in COVID, absolutely stressed to the limits, and moral injury is very pronounced in healthcare. In fact, people are now saying, I spoke to a doctor who’s, we’re running a conference on this coming up, and she’s a psychiatrist out of the States and runs moral injury as a podcast. And she says, it’s not burnout, it’s actually moral injury, because healthcare professionals are highly resilient people. They’re highly trained in stressful situations, but they’re being asked to do things that compromise their training and their values when they know they could save a life. That’s an injury.

Danielle Mik:

And it’s interesting that you talk about that. A lot of people think burnout really could be as a result of moral injury. Do you think there’ll be quite a number of cases where people are diagnosed with anxiety and depression, but really the underlying, if you peel back the layers and get back to the root cause, it’s moral injury that’s actually the cause of the anxiety and depression?

Kathie Melocco:

Well, first of all, I’m a trained chaplain. I’m not a mental health expert, even though we do a whole range of training in that area. But the early research indicates that you can have a moral injury with no mental health issues and it can coexist, particularly with PTSD, because it often causes depression or suicide ideation. I mean, moral injury, some of the symptoms are profound shame that doesn’t settle, which is unique to moral injury. Extreme anger, guilt, those feelings that do not resolve in therapy. And there’s actually a journalist from Reuters that is speaking at an event we are organizing, and he spoke about, he’s been admitted to a mental health facility several times because he was a bureau chief and three of his journalists were killed in Iraq, and he was responsible. Well, he feels responsible. He didn’t kill.

Kathie Melocco:

Psychiatric support was not helping him move past a certain point, so he reached out to a chaplain from one of the healthcare facilities and they did an actual ritual ceremony, which helped him enormously. So some of the things are things like rituals, apologizing, saying goodbye, taking responsibility, but particularly finding your voice. I find it fascinating on LinkedIn watching people slowly try to find their voices. They’re very nervous, and all of a sudden they start to enter into a conversation.

Danielle Mik:

Yes, definitely. So Kathie, do you think that in your experience, with the people that you’ve worked with, because obviously you can’t speak in general terms, I appreciate that. But with the people you talk to, do you see it as being a reason that contributes to staff turnover, and people rather than try and get it fixed, will resign and leave those employers?

Kathie Melocco:

Absolutely. People don’t leave jobs, they leave the people they work with. I mean, that’s so often said. So if we are not giving leaders the skills, and I talk about it to be servant leaders in this day and age, which is about looking at all of their stakeholders and about looking at their wellbeing generally, the environment they’re operating in, people will leave. People don’t want to work 24/7. People want to spend time with their families, and people don’t necessarily want to have their office in their family room either. They want to extract themselves.

Kathie Melocco:

The challenge we’ve got with people leaving because of moral injury is how do we replace that workforce? So it becomes an economic imperative, and we can’t keep doing the same thing, but we’ve got to start up-skilling our leaders. Everyone’s a leader, we’re a leader of our own family, but we’ve got to start up-skilling people more than we are doing you. A manager suddenly becomes a leader. Like, yeah, so what’s expected? And one of the key things we find when people are in distress, it’s the environment that the leader has missed that’s caused the problem.

Kathie Melocco:

An environmental analysis, we call it. So looking at the things that you wouldn’t normally think about, because leaders could be so blinkered. They think only about this, but it’s actually that that’s harmed them. And very often it could be somebody disclosing a terrible situation at home to their manager and they’re diminished. The response isn’t there. So, one of the things we try and help people to do is, if you don’t have time to respond to something in that moment, make sure you say, “Look, I’m just on this deadline at the moment, but I really want to spend some time with you and talk about this. Can I come back to you?”

Danielle Mik:

Yes, and circle back to it. Yes.

Kathie Melocco:

And you’re validating them, because in systems which fail people, betray people and moral injure people all the time, and I’m actually a critic of customer service because customer service is down to a procedure. Now, if someone discloses something to you in a system, it doesn’t always come out when it’s the right time. So you could be the person they’re disclosing, and if you say the right thing and validate the person in that moment, research indicates it can save years of therapy, and I would even suggest workers’ compensation claims.

Danielle Mik:

Yes. No doubt.

Kathie Melocco:

By simply saying, “I am so sorry that happened to you.” You don’t have to agree, but you have to validate people.

Danielle Mik:

Absolutely, and look, having worked with literally thousands of people over my 30 years in this area, or 30 years plus, one of the most common criticisms you hear from people with injuries of the employers is that they just didn’t listen. They just didn’t listen. They didn’t take time to listen to what the problem was. So it’s the lack of acknowledgement, like you said, validation of being heard that really stays with people for a very long time, because it makes you feel irrelevant, and you don’t have connection, and a whole variety of different other things kick in. Those are things that are basic human needs, and people don’t get the met. Love, connection, and belonging is a fundamental human need.

Kathie Melocco:

Absolutely.

Danielle Mik:

And if you’re not heard, you don’t get that. That need is not met. So, look, it’s interesting because the employment space is clearly changing. I think we’ve sort of come out of, and COVID, it depends on how philosophical you want to get. I think there’s been some good things that have come out of it. It’s made us re-examine how we are in the workplace, and I think we’ve just come out of a phase where everything was highest efficiency, automation, and no one took the time because it was all about lean operation and getting everything out. But what happens with that is you lose the humanity out things.

Kathie Melocco:

Absolutely.

Danielle Mik:

And I think we’ve sort of, now COVID has made us stop and reevaluate. It’s like, well actually, damn, we need to get some humanity back into the workplace, and maybe having the leanest machine is not necessarily the best thing.

Kathie Melocco:

It’s really interesting, because one of the things that we are noticing, because we’re at the coalface, is how so many systems are breaking down. That is because we’ve automated and systemized things in silos, and what we don’t recognize, and this is very relevant to workplaces and banks for example, what we don’t really realize that there’s a person that this is happening to and all these intersect with that particular person. So you might have your silos, but the outcome is you are harming the person. And one of the reasons we’ve decided to put moral injury very much on the agenda for a leadership issue and to be discussed about, because this is a leadership problem, is with all of these things happening during COVID we sat back and thought, how can we help? How can we help wake people up? What can we do?

Kathie Melocco:

So we are running, and this is not a self-promotion, we’re running a conference on March the 15th which is only $40. We’re donating our time, everybody’s donating, we’re only paying for technology. And we’re bringing together multidisciplinary experts across chaplaincy healthcare, aged care, all of the sectors, journalism, who are going to talk about what’s really going on. The goal is to help people understand that every decision you make impacts somebody else, every decision. And you’re right about humanity, but it’s a lot more historic than we actually even think. Our systems, if you take insurance, for example. Lloyd’s of London used to ensure African slaves as cargo. These organizations, we certainly living in 2022, but they’ve taken cultures from generations and generations and generations and overlaid it with new systems and new processes. It’s not going to go away just like that.

Danielle Mik:

No, no,

Kathie Melocco:

Yeah, we’ve got a responsibility as human beings. Not only for ourselves, but for the next generation, to try and improve things, because you shouldn’t be going to work and getting ill. You just shouldn’t.

Danielle Mik:

Kathie, if you to say two or three recommendations to employers, of the most important things that they need to target, to look at to make a change and improvement in their workplace for mental health, what would be they be?

Kathie Melocco:

Slowing things down. Human beings are not battery hens, and I know we live in busy, busy, busy environments, but slow things down, give people time to think, including yourself. Holding space for people, which I spoke about in terms of listening if something’s really important, like making the time. And yourself and others, learning validating skills so that you all walk the talk. Now, human beings aren’t perfect. We will make mistakes, but if you follow those premises, you’re putting humanity back into the workplace, no matter the imperative.

Danielle Mik:

And if a worker feels that they are experiencing some mental health issues from moral injury and it’s early on, what would your recommendations be to them? What would be the first steps for them?

Kathie Melocco:

Well, the first thing is, on our website we’ve got a whole lot of resources, so go and learn about it, and you will know if, oh, that could be something that’s happening to me. If you are seeing a therapist or a psychologist or a psychiatrist, talk to them about it. If they don’t know much about it, give them some information. If they reject it, perhaps ask could you talk to somebody else? Could they recommend I talk to somebody else just about that? I’d like to explore that a bit. And there are some recovery tools on our website as well that you can try, which are very simple things about communal space.

Danielle Mik:

Fantastic. Thanks so much, Kathie, appreciate your time. Is there anything else you want to add that I haven’t asked that?

Kathie Melocco:

Well, maybe I’ll just for a few seconds talk about what chaplaincy is.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah, sure.

Kathie Melocco:

So people understand that. WOW stands for World of Work, and we’re a secular chaplaincy, which means we don’t have a religious focus. We have a spiritual focus, and we say everybody has a sense of spirit about meaning and purpose to their lives. When we work with workplaces, and it’s really important people to understand, we don’t get government funding, nor do we want it, because we are not in anyone’s pockets. And that’s what’s really important for people to understand. We are paid by private donors, and if a workplace wants chaplaincy, it’s very similar to EAP, except we keep no notes. So when you talk to us, you’re talking to us, and it’s not going up the line. And this is not criticism of EAP, it’s a very important service, but sometimes you want to feel as though your discussion with us, or discussion with somebody, is going to stay with them.

Danielle Mik:

Yes, absolutely. Yes, and that’s very important. Look, that clearly is part of the reason why some people are very nervous about using EAPs, because they’re mistrusting of it. So the work you’re doing is fantastic, and I applaud you for what you’re doing. It’s great. And look, I’m sure we’re going to have many more interesting chats on LinkedIn, and looking forward to your conference. I’ll be making sure I’m there. Thank you so much for your time.

Kathie Melocco:

Thank you, Danielle, for having me. I’m delighted.

Danielle Mik:

Much appreciated. All the best. Take care.