A woman said she was taking two days off for mental health and her boss's response is fantastic

Madalyn Parker is a web developer, who recently emailed her team to tell them she was taking a few days off "to focus on my mental health".

Her CEO's response pleasantly surprised her.

She tweeted it.

The response then pleasantly surprised Twitter, and went viral, with over 33,000 likes and 10,000 retweets.

People asked why she needed to flag it as leave for mental health reasons, she replied:

Ben Congleton, the CEO in question, agreed and wrote a medium post about how the response shouldn't be considered anything but standard.

He wrote:

It is incredibly hard to be honest about mental health in the typical workplace. In situations like this, it is so easy to tell your teammates you are “not feeling well.”

Even in the safest environment it is still uncommon to be direct with your coworkers about mental health issues.

I wanted to call this out and express gratitude for Madalyn’s bravery in helping us normalize mental health as a normal health issue.

He reasoned:

It’s 2017. We are in a knowledge economy.

Our jobs require us to execute at peak mental performance.

When an athlete is injured they sit on the bench and recover.

Let’s get rid of the idea that somehow the brain is different.

What was most noticeable about the tone of the replies, was that many yearned for their employers to take a similar attitude to the health of their employees:

Sadly, in times like this where some CEOs think the best business model follows gig economy companies like Uber and Deliveroo, it seems Madalyn's story seemed a rarity.

HT Attn

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