Lockdown breakdowns

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2021

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It’s almost a year since the World Health Organization declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. Many embraced working from home to start off with. But has it lost its lustre? We look at the toll it’s taking on people’s mental health. We hear from Matthew Cooper, the co-founder of a start-up called Earn Up, a San Francisco-based financial technology platform that helps people automate their loan payments. He explains why the pandemic contributed to a breakdown at the end of 2020. We also speak to Margaret Heffernan, from the University of Bath, former CEO of five companies and author of several books including Uncharted, who tells us why checking in with staff must be done properly and personally, and hear from Mark Simmonds, the author of the memoir Breakdown and Repair: a fathers tale of stress and success; His own mental health issues led him to completely re-evaluate his career and working practices, and he offers some tips on coping with stress. Remember if any of the issues in today’s edition affect you, experts agree that it’s important to talk to someone and get support. Do seek the help of a professional mental health body if not a doctor, or friends and family.

Picture: A stock picture shows a woman perched on the end of a bed with a laptop (Credit: Getty)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Salagossa.
0:06.4	Coming up, lockdown breakdowns, the CEO who quit his job after a mental health crisis
0:12.3	precipitated by the COVID pandemic.
0:15.2	It was a matter of sort of days of going from being pretty good to being in like a really dangerous place where I could have
0:23.3	done something to harm myself. It's almost a year since the World Health Organization declared
0:28.9	the outbreak of COVID-19 a pandemic. And all this week, Business Daily is looking at its
0:33.9	impact on mental health, particularly in the workplace. You know, people feel very invisible at the moment because they are literally unseen.
0:43.1	And making people feel you're in their minds, you remember them, you remember them as individuals, is a tremendous boost.
0:52.2	That's all here on Business Daily from the BBC.
0:59.1	Yeah, it can be difficult to parse out in terms of what leads me to feel better or worse on any given day.
1:08.0	However, I think some of the factors in the pandemic that really impacted me
1:13.3	personally, everything being online, so I think really made me feel more cut off and I think more
1:20.0	alone. Matthew Cooper there is the co-founder of a startup called Earnup, a San Francisco-based
1:26.1	financial technology platform that helps people
1:29.1	automate their loan payments. In December, after a mental health breakdown in the summer,
1:33.9	Matthew stepped down as the company's CEO. Last year, I had a episode where I ended up
1:40.7	hospitalized initially and then in sort of an inpatient treatment facility
1:45.4	after just like a really scary descent of like or of my kind of mental health.
1:51.5	And coming out of that, I decided that I really just wanted to take a step back from
1:58.5	things that were stressors. And one of those was, you know, being the CEO of a
2:04.6	company in order to focus more on kind of mental health and stability. Now Matthews struggled with
2:10.3	anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation and post-traumatic stress disorder ever since he was a teenager.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.