“Mental health is key for founders in fast-growth start-ups – the challenge is that they often lack a support network where they can open up about and ease the strain of scaling businesses,” says Gerard Grech, chief executive of entrepreneur network company Tech Nation. The pandemic has just magnified these pressures. A survey conducted for mental health start-up Spill found that 4 in 5 of UK workers had felt close to burning out in the past year. Both the top and bottom end of the business structure had suffered the most, with entry-level graduates and senior executives most at risk of mental exhaustion. Add to that the environment in which Tom finds himself, the Tech sector, some 54% of tech workers were working into the evenings, well above the average of 40%. 3 in 5 were answering messages and emails regarding business in the evenings as opposed to the average of 45%.
There’s a lesson for us all here. If a young, successful entrepreneur can be honest about their mental health then perhaps it opens the door to the rest of us. Through isolation and quarantines, we have begun to view our niche’s, industries, connections and our world through the eyes of social media on the internet. Just remember the words from Hugh Laurie in the TV hit, ‘House’, usually after one of his sub-ordinates had been asking for a full medical history of an ill patient, “Everybody lies…”
Perhaps now is not the time.