Abstract: One out of every five, or nearly 53 million, adults in the United States has a mental illness (National Institute of Mental Health, 2022). Mental illness is a term used to describe a group of medical conditions that cause alterations in thought, feelings, mood, or behavior and impact daily functioning and the ability to relate to others (National Alliance on Mental Illness, n.d.). The prevalence of mental illness impacts the workplace directly and indirectly. Mental illness and comorbidities increase an employer’s annual spending on health insurance (Firth et al., 2019). Indirect costs of mental illness for employers include employee absences, higher employee turnover, and poor employee performance or inability to focus at work (Goetzel et al., 2002). Based on the prevalence of mental illness and its impact on the workplace, research is needed to understand how workplaces can better support employees with mental illness. Few scholars have extended research about mental illness from a focus on individual coping to applying organizational and adult learning theories to workplace interventions (Hastuti & Timming, 2021). There has been a recent call for research from an organizational perspective (Follmer and Jones, 2018). Within research that has been conducted on mental illness in the workplace, there is no consensus about what interventions are most effective in supporting employees with mental illness. Some research supports mindfulness interventions or encouraging employees to use an employee assistance program, while other studies suggest that training can help improve leaders’ perceptions of mental illness. (Huang et al., 2015; Milot, 2019; Schwarz et al., 2019). Outside the workplace, research has shown the positive effects of contact with individuals with a mental illness (Corrigan et al., 2010; Kosyluk et al., 2020). Interventions in the workplace that include video testimonials or role-playing have been found to increase help-seeking in employees with a mental illness and reduce negative views of mental illness, at least temporarily (Hamann et al., 2016; Shann et al., 2019; Tan et al., 2021). The purpose of this study is to explore how storytelling can be a method to increase perceptions of support for individuals with mental illness in the workplace. Considered within Mezirow’s adult learning theory of transformational learning, storytelling is “a way to make sense of our own experience and to communicate that experience to others” (Lawrence & Paige, 2016, p. 63). Telling and listening to stories helps individuals understand themselves, promotes empathy and understanding, and can disrupt stereotypes. This study is unique because it explores individual storytelling in the workplace, as opposed to organizational storytelling, and looks at the transformational learning effects of storytelling on the storyteller. The research question for this study is, how does storytelling affect the perceptions of support of individuals with mental illness in the workplace? Purposive and nonrandom sampling was used to identify six adults living in the US who identify as having a mental illness and have told a story about their mental illness in a workplace setting. Semi-structured interviews were conducted, and inductive coding was utilized to derive themes directly from the data. The primary finding from participant interviews was that individuals who shared their stories in the workplace did perceive support for their mental illness. In addition to perceptions of support, participants reported feeling less alone, safe, connected, and relieved after they shared their stories and received positive responses. However, perceptions of support were contingent on receiving a positive response to their story, the relationship between the storyteller and listener, and the listener's knowledge of mental illness. A subsidiary finding in the data was the perception by participants that programs in place at their workplaces to support mental illness are ineffective and that organizations need to do more to support employees who have a mental illness. Implications of these findings include the need to create workplace environments that nurture psychological safety and safe spaces for storytelling. Such settings would increase the likelihood that individuals who share stories about mental illness in the workplace would perceive that they are supported. In addition, workplaces should evaluate their current mental illness programs, obtain feedback from employees on the effectiveness of such programs, and consider creating programs that include storytelling as a component. The limitations of the study are related to the small sample size. This study should be repeated with a larger group of participants to make more definitive conclusions. In addition, the findings that identified relationship and knowledge of mental illness as contributing factors to perceptions of support should be tested for validity and reliability.
