The simple answer is nope. But in reality, there is no simple answer to such a complex question. So, I thought that it may help to share my own mental health journey, as context to this perhaps surprising answer.

Up until my early thirties, mental health conditions frankly happened to other people. After all, I was White, male and very privileged. And I mean very privileged. I was sent away at the tender age of thirteen to the world’s most famous school near Slough. Yes, that school. Indeed, I was in the same grade as a fairly normal boy called Cameron and a few grades below an adolescent with unruly white hair, universally known as Boris.

The first real manifestation of any possible mental health condition came just after I finished my first year as trade marketing manager for the eponymous beer brand, Guinness. This was my absolute dream job and our team had just completed a stellar trading period, smashing all targets and driving this iconic brand to record sales. Meanwhile I was happily married, living in a swanky apartment in Notting Hill with a beautiful baby on the way. And my corporate star was shining bright. What not to like.

One morning, I woke up and out of the blue, it was as if the wind had come out of my sails, the wiring had come loose in my head, and my precious mojo was… well a no show. All at once.

Suddenly for no explicable reason, I was unable to think straight, operate effectively and my productivity fell through the floor. For three months, I burnt up all those invaluable corporate credits that I had strived so hard to earn and my colleagues discreetly started asking if I was OK. I wasn’t, but I could hardly tell them that. And I had no clue why not. I still vividly remember trying desperately hard to take a tin of baked beans down from the cupboard – normally a simple everyday action for a physically abled person – and failing. It was simply too difficult.

As luck would have it, an opportunity arose for a positive career move across the organisation. And, as if by magic, the switch in my head turned back on, the wires reconnected, my mojo started purring and I was back in the game again. My ‘Black Dog’ – as Churchill called it – was thankfully back in its basket.

Over the next couple of decades, I was transferred to the States and for many happy years was living the ‘American Dream’ with my wonderful young family. However, in between the good times, I experienced several other similar chilling experiences, when the dreaded switch would go off, the black dog would growl and my beloved mojo would disappear back into hibernation. All of them seemingly random, but all ultimately requiring some sort of trigger to reverse. I never did anything about these episodes – putting it down to loss of confidence – and frankly it never crossed my mind that I had a mental health condition. I am by nature supremely optimistic so any consideration of depression was quite frankly, out of the question.

On the flip side, I had a strong bent towards innovation and an innate ability to ‘connect the dots’. Something that proved a key driver for my seemingly relentless climb up the international corporate ladder. Indeed, one highly comprehensive psychometric test on my executive fast track programme amazingly pegged me in the top 1% for innovation. Best brush over that I was also shockingly in the bottom 1% for detail. (Awkward.) My most effective ‘dot connecting’ would invariably happen on weekend mornings between 3 and 5am when my mind (in full manic mode) could perform at a level of 10X of my everyday brain capacity. It would start racing at a million miles an hour, busy cracking that gnarly problem, or unleashing some untapped opportunity that had been lurking in my subconscious all week. It was as if someone had surreptitiously poured a six-pack of Red Bull, a double espresso and a tin of WD40 into my cranium.

My long string of life luck finally ran out with a vengeance in 2008 when – after being ‘in the wrong seat at the wrong time’ – I was laid off in the financial crash. My family then experienced an utterly torrid seven years in the States and we fell into gut wrenching and numbing debt. By August 2015, I no longer even had the funds to feed my kids and when I could only scrape together $5.41 (the credit cards were maxed out) for a weekly shop for my family of five, the wiring didn’t just come loose, it had a complete and utter meltdown.

I was finally sent to see a doctor and was eventually presented with two pieces of paper. One for anti-depressants and the other a stark and direct instruction to go straight to the local emergency ward where a team of highly trained professionals were awaiting me. I tore up both pieces of paper, threw them in the bin and went home – after all, there was nothing wrong with me.

A few days later, access to hospital was no longer optional, and I was ‘sectioned for the foreseeable future’. The five scariest words I had ever heard in my life. Two questions kept racing through my manically racing mind. Was I to be locked up for life and would I ever see my darling children again?

I will spare you the gory details of life in a psychiatric ward, but naturally our entire world swiftly and completely unravelled. Hideous for me, ten times worse for my kids. Suffice to say, I was diagnosed with a chemical imbalance of the brain, called bipolar disorder. On the third expert diagnosis of bipolar, very grudgingly, I started to accept that I had a mental health condition. One seemingly with no cure and one that would require medication for life.

Back in the UK, my doctor banned me from a ‘desk job’ for a year as my brain needed time to recover from the trauma. For the first time in my life, I experienced ‘barriers to employment’. The only employer who didn’t give a jot about my condition was a local food processing plant. The assistant janitor job was mine, as long as I was prepared to work in the frozen meat warehouse, start at 4am and operate at a bracing -55 degrees. I was indeed! It was exceptionally hard work and (very) cold.

Back to bipolar. After a few false starts, I was finally prescribed lithium, a natural compound that can help stabilise moods, a medication that worked for me and after seven years now, it has proved invaluable removing the downswings, but critically it has hardly blunted the all-important creative episodes when the dots magically connect. However, while (the right) medication has been vital, that is only half the game. I was incredibly fortunate to have amazing support from my doctor, my family and my close friends. With a mental health condition, you also need ‘coping mechanisms’ – admittedly a new term to me at the time. My number one coping mechanism is open water swimming (wild swimming) – something I stumbled upon and now barely go more than a couple of days without a swim, every week of the year. Rivers, lakes, seas, typically swimming at dawn or dusk – when light and water dance – I am no longer just enjoying nature from a distance. I am part of nature. I have my own unique, money can’t buy, Planet Earth performance. Each and every swim. The ultimate mood stabiliser.

So where does mental health and neurodiversity fit into my personal mission now? After my bone chilling 8-month spell as janitor and a couple of years clawing my way back up the corporate ladder I was made redundant for the FINAL time in 2018. It was then that I decided to leave the corporate world and try and ‘change the world’.

I co-founded the Bridge of Hope – with George Freeman MP – my life-long friend from Newmarket, to connect people with ‘barriers to employment’ to inclusive employers seeking to diversify their talent pools. Bridge of Hope Careers is now an inclusive talent portal and we are thrilled to have over 75,000 highly resilient candidates registered – supported by over 130 wonderful charities, social enterprises and Non-Russell Group universities – along with countless self-referrals. We are delighted to partner with over 54 blue chip inclusive employers, such as KPMG, Diageo Cognizant, Enterprise, Hello Fresh, Molson Coors, Kier and Jacobs, along with a host of leading recruitment agencies.

Many of these candidates, by implication, will have some form of mental health condition – how can you not, if you have experienced the life trauma of being homeless, a refugee, in prison or fighting in a war zone? However, research confirms that such challenging ‘life experiences’ generate greater perseverance, resilience and grit. ‘Grit’ is proven to be the greatest predicator of future success – ahead of IQ, qualifications, track record etc – according to world renowned Grit expert, Angela Duckworth.

As for some specific neurodiverse talent pools, I am acutely conscious of not stereotyping here, but as an employer seeking to diversify your talent pool, you may well have made progress with diversity of gender and race, but what about socio-economic diversity, age diversity and why on earth are you not looking to hire candidates with the ‘ability to think differently’? For example, if you are seeking compliance, operations or quality control talent, should you not be proactively sourcing from the autistic untapped talent pool? Shockingly less than 20% of whom have a job and now with flexible working that is a unique talent pool you shouldn’t ignore. Or perhaps, if you are sourcing highly creative marketing candidates, why not seek out dynamic dyslexic talent? Per world famous perfumer Jo Malone, fellow dyslexics are brilliant at thinking differently. Indeed, dyslexics are proven to be highly creative – hardly surprising as they have had to work around the system all their lives.

As for bipolar, well it turns out most of the founding fathers in America were diagnosed retrospectively with bipolar! So, let’s cut out all this negativity attached to the name of my condition; I am fine with the bipolar bit, it does what it says on the tin. But I deeply resent disorder. For me I have bipolar reorder.

So, would I get rid of my bipolar if I had the chance?

The answer remains no, but with an important caveat. That this answer is based on my current situation. Now that I am stable and we are building something that is giving renewed hope and changing lives at scale. I would also hate to lose my ability to think differently and help people facing adversity from a position of genuine empathy. After all, a job is the biggest game changer in life.

However, if I could wind back the clock and get my beloved family back – yes of course I would. In a heartbeat.

 

This article was written for The Diversity Trust by James Fellowes, inclusive hiring pioneer and Founder of Bridge of Hope Careers. You can connect / message with James at LinkedIn.