For this week’s Inside Out I thought I’d share some wellbeing related observations from different roles including in the Library, on the Library welfare response team, being part of a school board and attending a recognizing signs of stress workshop last week.

The combination of layers of stressors.  Last month marked the third anniversary of the atrocity of the terrorist attacks.  There is the constant sad news from overseas with the war in Ukraine.  I’ve strongly suggested to one close family member recently they stop watching the news because of their worry/sleeplessness at nights about families and children impacted by the Ukraine situation.  There is a lot going on in the world.  The high cost of living, lockdowns over the past two years, Delta, now Omicron, everything keeps changing and just when we get used to one phase of response to the pandemic it all changes again.

Interacting with stressed members of our communities.  Teachers are concerned for their personal safety as they experience physical assault from a small but growing number of children – not an uncommon occurrence around the country.  Our school is putting more of our budget into providing counselling services onsite .. also very grateful for the support of two churches in the community who are helping with funding for this.  Irrational behaviour and/or anger from some parents/caregivers about restrictions in general presents as abusive emails and intimidating in-person behaviour towards teaching staff.  At the extreme end it is necessary to involve the police.  As the mental health poster says it is understandable for us to feel angry and overwhelmed at times.  It’s not ok for this to spill over and threaten others, but how do people get the support they need to work through their frustrations and emotions.

How to respond as a bystander or as a directly involved person to wide ranging views on many issues and feelings of division even within close friends and family members.  Having to wear masks/others not wearing masks, vaccine passes needed to keep everyone safe/vehement opposition to mandates for various reasons, my personal freedoms and rights vs others rights, feelings about the pandemic in general from the dismissive (“it’s just a runny nose”, “it will all blow over soon”) to more worry, anxiety and sense of being overwhelmed at the other end of the spectrum.  Fear of catching Covid and fear of loved ones getting ill or dying of Covid.

Many experience stress being onsite with Omicron around us.  Some are finding it hard that under Alert Level 3 lockdown that everyone was largely working from home compared to traffic light red phase 3 with 10s of thousands of cases a day and yet many restrictions are coming off.

Some people are doing it particularly tough but you wouldn’t necessarily know.

A few thoughts on responding to all of this:

• Much of it comes down to the key thing of being kind to each other. I was talking to a teacher friend the other day and they shared how much it made their day when one of the parents just said “thank you”
• People and Culture have been updating wellbeing resources on their Intranet, sometimes resources such as these can be helpful reminders. Check out their advice for this specifically in relation to Covid
• At school they have ‘guardian angels’ where each teacher takes on a role of being a guardian angel for a colleague, checking in with them, seeing how they are going etc. Is there someone each one of us can be looking out for today and checking in on them?
• They also do great morning teas at school. Really well.  We’re very much looking forward to when we can all meet back in the Library together over kai – stay tuned for more on that.

Tim S