Ep. 282: Mental Health Stigma in the Philippines

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 282, the Mental Health Stigma in the Philippines. This is an interesting topic because it's different in different countries around the world where we're making progress with mental health. In the US we have come a really long way. The Philippines is not the same. So in the Philippines, and I've gotten most of this information from Julia, but in the Philippines, it's hard to seek mental health help, and there's. Not only is it expensive and scarce, but there's a stigma around it. So I want to share with you a story from one of our longtime subscribers that will illustrate this and give you a really good idea of what's going on. Now, we've rewritten this just to make it more clear, but it's basically the story that he sent to me. So here's what he says. An OFS who's been working with us for years experienced a serious tragedy. So. So we offered to arrange for help with a therapist through an online counseling mental health website. They accepted the offer, reported attending online therapy sessions, and eventually said they were feeling better. But they later admitted that they only attended a couple sessions with the reason that they had a hard time making appointments. Months later, I found out from another team member that the OFS never went to the therapy, despite reporting that they wanted to and repeatedly telling me directly in zoom calls that it was helpful. When confronted, the team member told me they had never used it, but was too ashamed to decline the offer. To save face, they lied about using it. Here in the US we don't have that stigma about mental health. If you're depressed or anxious or you have an addiction or relationship issue, you go to a therapist. It's not a big deal. Everybody's doing it. So that's the story, and that's what he has said. Now, I don't necessarily agree that there's not a stigma around mental health, but I do agree that it's getting a lot better here in the US So I went to Julia and asked her about this and what she thinks about the mental health thing in the Philippines and specifically this situation. And here's what she says. In the Philippines, shame and stigma are still associated with mental illness and asking for mental health support. Some shame and stigma come from people who still associate asking for mental health treatment with being crazy or deranged. If you're diagnosed with something, you need to be institutionalized, but that's what people think. I'm adding to Julia's words here. Julia continues. Religion also plays a role in feeding into that stigma. Many Filipinos have grown up being told that if they're feeling overwhelmed, helpless, or afraid, all they need to do is ask God for help and pray it away. If that doesn't work, maybe we didn't pray enough or we're not devout enough. We didn't do enough to fix ourselves, and God didn't see us as good enough to be fixed. Now I'm going to add to what Julia is saying here in that's how I grew up too. If you're having a problem, well, you need to buck up and get over it. Or you need to pray and God's going to fix it and that's really all the help you need. Or yeah, if he doesn't help you, then you didn't have enough faith. And that's how I grew up, and I definitely don't feel that way today. So Julia continues. Lastly, some are simply ignorant about the issue. Some don't know that mental health issues are a real thing. Some believe mental illness is a curse brought about by monsters that faith healers and witch doctors can cure. The Philippine government is doing something about it. It's still expensive, but more people are speaking up about it. Even PhilHealth now provides a limited ment health package. It's not much, nowhere near enough, but it's something. And that's the end of what Julia wrote. So the good news is it's starting to change. Another good news is you can get you can help your OFS by providing PhilHealth for them, which is super cheap. And if you're using OnlineJobs PH inside of your OnlineJobs PH account, we recently just put a full document about how to handle insurance and Healthcare and PhilHealth and any other benefits you might want to provide. Totally optional, but if you scroll down, it's in the documents in your Guides to Outsourcing section. If you log into your online jobs account and go to your My Account page, which is the page you should land on, scroll down, it's in the your Guides to Outsourcing section. Now, to add a little bit to this that's not related to mental health, the ofs lied to save face and the employer in this story tells us that they he has told me that their work has suffered sometimes to save face. And this idea of saving face, which we often associate with the Japanese culture, is also a very Asian thing. And it's very it's very very Filipino, too. I've seen this a lot over the years, so I'm going to talk about that in a coming episode. Now I have a series where I talked about mindless work. Now this, in this situation, this employer has told me that his OFS sometimes does poor work and they're doing it to save face. And this is what we call mindless work. We have a series on johnjonas.com about mindless work. It was it's been a newsletter. It's been in my newsletters in the past. Now it's published@johnjones.com and if you go to johnjones.com and search mindless, you'll get the series. I'll also try to link to it in this podcast episode. That's it. In a coming episode, I'll talk more about saving face for mental health. Hopefully you can ask your ofs if they're struggling. Ask them, are you struggling with some mental health things? Are you feeling depressed? Are you feeling anxious? Are you feeling problems? And from there you can try and help them.