– Jacob Moss

1. Because telling you would be like the equivalent of one of those warning notes on take away coffee cups stating the contents may be hot

2. Because telling you would be the equivalent of the the little diagram attached to your hair dryer that has a big red cross over a hairdryer in a bathtub

3. Because telling you would be like explaining why you should never go to IKEA with anybody you are fond of

4. Well, you get the point…

The reason why we’re not telling you is because we don’t need to – it’s obvious. Especially after a year of our heads going through the equivalent of a cage-fighting match with fears, thoughts, and anxieties.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock made out of a solid stone of ignorance for several years, the fact that our mental state needs maintenance and TLC is not new to you.

The pandemic has made this, even more, bare-ass obvious.

By saying out loud ‘you can take a mental health day if you need it,’ we’re looking to encourage our colleagues to pay attention to how they’re feeling and to take time off when they feel like their mental health is the equivalent of that moment when the popcorn bag in the microwave is giving off that burnt smell.

We’re no pioneers in introducing a mental health day at The Wurst Agency and we’re not trumpeting our praise by publishing this blog post.

We’re simply putting it out there as we find it ridiculously ludicrous (try saying that potentially crazy cool hip hop name x10 fast) that this is not more of a thing being encouraged, or at least discussed, in workplaces.

In Austria, you’re entitled to take sick days if your mental health is in a bad state, however, this is not common knowledge, and it’s not something commonly done due to the workplace stigma attached to doing so.

And, unfortunately, this stigma usually flows from the top down.

We’re making it official at our agency, in the hope that it encourages our team members to genuinely feel comfortable taking such a sick day if needed.

This paid leave shouldn’t only be taken when you feel like you’re on the brink, but our colleagues can take it when they feel they need a day to recharge and focus on caring for themselves and what’s going on in their heads.

We decided to publish this blog post as we hope it contributes to the opening up of discussions regarding mental health in the workplace.

We aim for it to reach a point that taking a day off to nurse your head can be as casually talked about as when you call up sick because your head is full of snot.

We mean, why shouldn’t it be this way?!

We all, without exception, experience the neverending cat and mouse game our minds play, so how are we not more empathetic in the workplace to those that experience a more intense version where the cat and mouse are lighting fire to the curtains and swinging from the chandeliers?

Dealing with mental health issues should not be an awkward subject in the workplace.

Especially in industries like ours in which you spend your entire day firing flares up to your brain to fulfill a variety of different tasks.

The agency scene is infamous for its abundance of stress, and the anxious dash for deadlines that you feel like you’re doing on repeat.

Also, the creative contorting of our brains that we do on a daily basis also takes its toll.

So, yeah, it’s no mystery why we need to tend to our mental health on a regular basis.

If this last year of a shit show has taught us anything, it is that we should all be paying a lot more attention, and speaking a lot more openly, about the health of the innards of our brains.