With it being Mental Health Awareness Week, Adoreum thought it would look back to one of our fantastic Thought Leadership Series Breakfasts hosted by Karina Robinson, CEO of Robinson Hambro at the Hotel Café Royal, which focused on the often overlooked mental health issues associated with business and how a deeper understanding of the brain can beneficial in your career.
The stigma around mental health issues within the UK is slowly beginning to lift, it is now on the government’s agenda, which is necessary considering how many people it affects. Karina shared some thought-provoking statistics which highlighted the reach of its impact; every two seconds someone in the UK Googles the word depression, approximately 25% employees will experience mental health problems at some point in their lives, and worryingly, 94% executives admitted they would be prejudiced to hiring someone with mental health problems.
Karina first became interested in this issue on both a professional and personal level; Robinson Hambro worked on a research project for a mental health organisation, but a bit closer to home, Karina’s husband suffered from undiagnosed depression. It was this combination which inspired Karina to become a non-executive board member of a mental health organisation; My Cognition.
My Cognition is a science-based company dedicated to understanding and improving cognitive health. One of its most exciting features is an online test which assesses your brain activity, drawing up a vision of your five main cognitive domains. Karina explained that by understanding your strength or weakness in a specific domain means that you can actively combat imbalance in your brain through online games, tests and quizzes. This not only can prevent the development of mental health problems, but can also help within the work place;
‘There was an instance where a Chairman and CEO of a company were not getting along. By running the tests we could see the discrepancies between their cognitive domains and help them adjust the way they spoke to each to appeal to their specific brains- it had positive results’.
Not only does My Cognition have the ability to allow individuals to tackle the weaker part of their cognition, but Karina also is excited about the data that can be attained from the tests; ‘the possibility for medical science to do something with this data to improve the treatment of mental illness, even diseases such as Alzheimer’s and dementia, is fascinating’.
To find out more about My Cognition, and to take the test yourself, head to http://www.mycognition.com/about/.
