WHEN the GG2 Power List caught up with Poppy Jaman at the end of 2022, she was typically honest and feisty when answering questions. She was one of 20 bosses of mental health organisations who had written and signed an open letter to the prime minister urging him to step in and stop suicides which are being caused by the cost-of-living crisis.
“During the pandemic we predicted what we then called a tsunami of mental health challenges coming,” she said. “This was CEOs of mental health charities talking about the fact that data around the world shows that after a global trauma, a global incident, a traumatic incident, you get significant mental health difficulties within the communities that have experienced it. And that narrative was shut down.”
You sensed her outrage, disappointment and her determination to make change. The letter, seen by the Power List, warns Rishi Sunak that “people living in the most deprived 10 per cent of areas in the UK are more than twice as likely to die from suicide than those living in the wealthiest 10 percent”.
Poppy Jaman, is the CEO of MindForward Alliance [MFA]. It describes itself as “a global chapter developed by Mental Health Alliance, a not-for-profit membership organisation Jaman founded in 2017. The cost-of-living crisis and the aftereffects of the pandemic have made things worse when it comes to mental health.
“This year, it's very difficult to say what the highlights were from my professional field, because in the last three weeks, I have had 10 conversations about suicide, one person died by suicide, three of my colleagues have been to funerals by suicide. So, I am ending on a year where we are seeing the accumulative exacerbated impact of the pandemic. Let's not kid ourselves, [about] mental health difficulties, services being depleted, waiting lists being high, and seeing increased stresses in society, particularly around children and young people. They were all issues that were there, the pandemic exacerbated it, and I would say from a mental health perspective, poverty, inflation, they are the social determinants of health. What we're seeing is significantly increased mental health difficulties, and I've never had such a short period of time where I've had so many suicide conversations, and it's heart breaking.”
MFA has branches in the UK, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia. The mission statement is clear: “Our ambition is to unite businesses globally to set the global standards for workplace mental health.” What that means is that it helps businesses recognise and navigate the mental health challenges which often remain hidden and not talked about. MFA’s global chapter chair is John Flint,the chief executive of the UK Infrastructure Bank and former global CEO of HSBC. This is proof, if ever it was needed, of Jaman’s influence and convening powers.
“Our vision is creating mentally healthy workplaces, and inspiring health creation,” she told a global audience in 2021. “I feel very strongly that workplaces need to get this right because my recovery would not have happened. If I didn’t have a job that fostered my strengthened my identity beyond the diagnosis, beyond being a Bengali girl, beyond being a brown woman.”
And this “Bengali girl” has had her fair share of challenges. Her family arranged her marriage when she was 17.
“For years, I described it as arranged because I was trying really hard to be diplomatic and make sure that I didn’t bring reputational harm or hurt my parents. But some years into describing it as an arranged marriage, I changed my mind, and I decided it wasn’t arranged because I didn’t consent to the marriage, I was forced to agree to get married. That decision, then led to significant mental health struggles. And I felt if I didn’t call it out for what it was, then I wasn’t creating psychological safety. My community for other men and women to also call out their experiences and validate it, and I had a responsibility to do that. I was an incredibly rebellious teenager, and one of the things that my family decided was to try and contain me and help me see what the right way of being was, [was] to take me to Bangladesh and get me married. So that’s what happened.”
At the time, her mission was to cope with the trauma inflicted upon her.
“I found myself in Bangladesh, and actually one of my coping mechanisms was self-harming. Self-harming is a mechanism, a tool, if you want to call it that, that people use to cope. I felt quite numb, and if I was self-harming, cutting, then I was able to feel something. That was what I was doing to support myself. I was doing quite a lot of reading, and I was doing quite a lot of cleaning. I remember those three things and routine and structure in my day while I was in Bangladesh became very crucial. I also became very much into my faith. So, you know, I became a practising Muslim during that period, so praying five times a day. I’m not a practising Muslim now, but if I think about this, for my 17-year-old self, what I was doing is finding ways to connect with spirituality to give me a sense of grounding. I imagine lots of people will be able to relate to that.”
Jaman may be diminutive in stature, but she is a giant intellectually. The FT described the Mental Health Alliance as one of the fastest growing small medium enterprises in Europe.
Today, she influences big FTSE companies to change the way they tackle mental health challenges among their workforces.
“We’re in the financial services sector in London, in Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore,” said Jaman. “We’re developing chapters in the US, India, and Portugal. These are all massive financial institutions. HSBC is a member. Goldman Sachs is a member. Lloyds Banking Group is a member, and their CEOs, and their leaders, and their boards have made mental health a priority.
“And they are baking in the well-being of their people into their business strategy. So they’ve moved it from being an HR thing, to actually, if we want to create prosperous businesses that are that are forward thinking, that are attracting the right talent, that are building businesses, that are responsible citizens within the ecosystem they sit in, we have to demonstrate and be able to hold ourselves to account when it comes to the mental health of our people, what does that look like?”
“We cannot take our foot off the pedal, and the prime minister must provide strong political leadership and reassert the importance business across the private, public and social sectors, from the largest to the smallest, doing all they can to create workplace cultures that support the mental health of all employees including signposting to services when they are needed.
Jaman’s work with the bosses of FTSE 100 companies means they are breaking taboos. She said they were sharing personal own stories of being vulnerable caused by work-related stress. Suddenly, it has become OK to admit you need help, without anyone thinking you are weak.
“Leadership vulnerability matters. If you, as the chief exec of Lloyds Banking Group or HSBC or London Stock Exchange, you share what you have experienced, and then talk about how you have supported yourself and how this is personal to you, you’ll give permission to all of your people within your organisation to speak up,” explained Jaman. “When everybody speaks up, you do two things. You create psychological safety because people don’t worry about the fear. They don’t have a fear of the consequences on their careers because the CEO is talking about it. And they don’t have a fear of futility that if I say something, nothing’s gonna happen anyway, so what’s the point?”
Spending time with Jaman makes you realise her journey to make a better world is far from over.
“You cannot keep putting a sticking plaster on the problem,” she said. “The system is so broken that we need to we need to fix the social determinants. There is no point going, well, actually, we're gonna give people more talking therapy, and we're going to medicate people. If people can't feed themselves, if people can't feed their kids, they're not going to have good mental health. You are going to see horrible situations come out of that and significant trauma, and that's really upsetting.”
