Shrink Psychology
Studying psychology for years I found that there are many tools that are helpful in evaluating employee mental health and predicting the behavior of an employee who maybe productive one day and leave abruptly the next.
The arsenal I use is the 12-item autism spectrum and a list of about 10 cognitive distortions you can google. Searching the 10 personality disorders a person can fall victim to is also interesting. Tools like the emotion wheel can provide information that is under the surface, remember icebergs like your unconscious are vast and mostly unseen. Improving your emotional vocabulary increases vision into your unconscious. I keep an emotion wheel stuck to a filing cabinet in my office with a magnet.
Being aware of the many specific purpose treatment modalities gives me hope that professionals can improve a patient’s lot and lead some to recovery. One favorite from DBT, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy developed by Marshal Linehan is Opposite Action for emotional regulation. Easy to find online. The titles I have mentioned could create fifty essays.
My son gave me a holiday gift book called the DSM five which is a pocket guide for the psychiatric diagnostic exam, it talks about the many questionnaires or inventories used to create a picture of mental disorders. Reading this book I discovered the work of Joel Jager. He recommends asking just four simple social history questions to determine a person’s mental disposition.
Where do you live?
With whom do you live?
How do you spend your days?
How do you support yourself?
The answers provide insight into the mental health of your employees, the answers can predict who may leave, getting a person help can save a productive employee.
W. Edward Deming wrote in his System of Profound Knowledge http://deming.org/explore/sopk/ deming.org/explore/sopk/ “in business you should spend about a quarter of your time on psychology. Not to become a psychiatrist but to understand motivation.” This science is too vast for the lay person unless you take it on as a hobby like me. The four questions above can save us from falling down the information well.
