By Rebecca Clark
“Anxiety: it’s more common than you think . . .” so said the speaker during a sensitive and informative seminar I recently attended on Mediation and Mental Health. Slightly troubled, I looked at the statistics. In England, 1 in 6 people report experiencing a common mental health problem (such as anxiety and depression) in any given week. Shockingly, 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health problem of some kind each year in England. And I suspect that most of those questioned were not involved in a dispute.
As we know, stress, anxiety and depression can severely impact on someone’s ability to make decisions. Given that mediation is all about exploring options and empowering parties to make their own decisions rather than having a court make one for them, anything that impacts on that ability, or the output from it, is a concern. And if a person arrives at the mediation with a pre-existing mental health condition, the additional stress of being in a mediation is even more significant. After all, we cannot eliminate stress from disputes.
A couple of years ago, I was contacted by two brothers who disagreed on how to run their large manufacturing business, inherited from their father. This had led to the younger brother suffering what was described as a breakdown and him being absent from work for a number of months. Their large wider family had been severely impacted already and the brothers wanted to avoid a formal dispute arising and reach a very practical solution to manage the business. The hope was that this could lead to a repair of the relationship between them and the wider family.
Because I had been told about the younger brother’s mental health crisis, I was able to have a very open conversation with him and his wife about how to design the process in a way which gave him psychological safety. From the outset, we arranged short sessions over a number of weeks, giving time between each session for reflection and for anxiety levels to dissipate. Initially, this worked well. However, there were also very deep-routed inter-personal and family dynamics in play, along with other undiagnosed suspected mental illnesses and every time we came near to reaching a solution, these would be brought up and thrown back into the mix. The personal, mental health and business issues were inextricably linked. My overwhelming concern was that I could make things worse.
With a sense of trepidation, I suggested to the brothers that it might make sense to bring someone else into the mediation — a psychologist, or a psychotherapist who could help them work through some of the mental health issues and the family dynamic issues and the impact this was having on them both. They bravely agreed.
It was transformational.
Working with a psychotherapist meant that there was a separation between the deeply emotional family issues (which the psychotherapist dealt with) and the more practical business issues (which I dealt with). If the dispute were a washing machine churning round and round, we were able to separate out the whites from the colours and peg them on different washing lines. The brothers knew that when they were with me, we were talking about the business and when they were with the psychotherapist, they were talking about themselves. By creating this framework and by working closely together, the psychotherapist and I gave the brothers the psychological safety they needed to address their personal issues, which in turn, enabled them to reach a practical solution to the problems they were faced with.
It took nearly two years — a far cry from the one day mediation model many of us are trained in. Was it still stressful: yes, undoubtedly. But were the parties psychologically safe and supported: yes. Was this the thing that unlocked a resolution: most definitely.
The beauty of mediation is its flexibility to adapt to parties’ needs, including their mental health needs in a way which is considered, respectful and non-stigmatising. I am certainly not suggesting that co-mediating with a psychiatrist is an obvious solution. But I would love to start a conversation about others’ experiences. And maybe we can also have a conversation about how we turn up to mediations with our own mental health experiences. After all, anxiety is more common than you think.