World Mental Health Day was last month, and if your feed looked anything like mine, was full with posts, webinars and reminders to check in on each other. That's a good thing!

Now that things have quieted down, I want to ask a slightly different question. When someone in your workplace is struggling, who do they actually tell?

The assumed answer might be  HR. But the data points to a different answer. 

Where people actually go

When employees disclose a mental health issue, the majority of people tell a co-worker (59%) or a supervisor (54%). Only 21% go to HR directly (HR Reporter).

Plenty of people don't feel safe telling anyone with authority over them. Only 49% of Canadian workers feel comfortable telling their manager about a mental health issue, while 27% wouldn't and another 24% aren't sure (TELUS Health). Workers who wouldn't feel comfortable score lower on the TELUS Mental Health Index, compared with those who would.

Now, I don't think anyone set it up that way on purpose. Mental health is a people issue, and people issues tend to get dumped into the people department by default.

Why are people skipping HR?

The biggest barrier is that going to HR turns something personal into something formal. What HR can usually offer is policy-driven: your benefits, the employee assistance program, and the accommodation process. Each of those asks a lot of someone who's already running on empty.

Think about it from the employee's side. Use my benefits… call the EAP… figure out what an accommodation even looks like, maybe get documentation from my physician. That's a lot of extra effort, and frankly, when you're not doing great, you don't have the time or energy for it. Everything gets documented, too, which adds another layer of complexity to what already feels like a pretty complicated period of life.

So if someone can get the help they need without going through a formal process, they're going to find another way.

It's also worth remembering how heavy disclosure is in the first place. The number of things someone weighs before deciding to share a mental health issue at work is enormous. This is why people prefer to confide in their coworkers. 

Why do coworkers come first?

Power is part of it. More than half of workers still believe disclosing a mental health issue could hurt their career (HR Reporter), and a coworker has no say in your performance review.

Familiarity matters just as much, though. Think about who you'd go to first if you were struggling. It's probably the people you know, the ones you already have candid and casual conversations with, and the ones you're confident can actually help. People go where they already feel safe – and that likely isn’t the HR department.

A human skill set anyone can learn

Supporting someone who's struggling with their mental health is a human skill set, and anyone can learn it. It could be someone in HR or someone on the IT team. If there's a person at work who can help, I couldn't care less what department they sit in.

To be fair to HR, I have a lot of respect for the people who do this work. I've worked with plenty of HR professionals who are fantastic at listening and genuinely caring for people. I've also met some who are mainly there to enforce policy, but that's true of every department. Some people are great at the human side of the job, and some are less so.

Still, we put a lot of undue pressure on HR to be great at this, and there's no need for them to carry it alone when other people can step in. HR can keep doing what they do well, like managing the EAP contract and deciding on the benefits people get. That work is important. They just don't need to be the mental health first aiders for the whole organization.

The mistakes good-intentioned people make

When a colleague opens up, most of us want to help. But even with the best intentions, a few mistakes come up again and again:

• Downplaying the struggle. Minimizing what someone's going through, even to make them feel better, can leave them feeling unheard. Think of the classic “But look on the bright side!”

• Offering sympathy instead of empathy. Feeling sorry for someone keeps them at arm's length. Empathy means trying to understand what it's actually like for them.

• Giving advice from your own experience. You've probably heard this one: "I felt the same way when that happened to me. Here's what I did, you should do that too." While it's well meant, and it rarely lands well.

• Not encouraging other support. You can’t take on the weight of supporting someone’s mental health alone.

Whether you're a peer or a manager, your role is to be a good listener, check in, and offer practical support where you can. Then encourage the person to get help beyond you, because it can never be just you. What makes us resilient as humans is our ability to lean on a wide network of social support, more than one or two people.

The bottom line

The person someone confides in first is usually the colleague at the next desk or the manager they trust. That’s where support starts, whether we’ve planned for it or not.

So instead of asking how to get more people to go to HR, ask how ready the rest of your people are for that conversation. A few basics go a long way: listen more than you talk, don’t rush to fix it, and help the person find more support than just you.

Soon, I’ll pick this up from the manager’s side: where managers get stuck, how to hand someone off to more support, and the one thing I’d put in place if your organization does nothing else.