Mental health must be a business priority in the Pacific Islands

By Ron Rocky Coloma

“It’s freakin’ tough out there and even tougher in here,” said Melissa Doman, an organizational psychologist and former clinical mental health therapist, during a recent virtual fireside interview hosted in collaboration with Mental Health America Hawaii.

Doman, author of “Yes, You Can Talk About Mental Health at Work: Here’s Why (and How to Do It Really Well),” made a clear case: mental health should no longer be treated as a nice-to-have in professional settings. “How can it not be a critical conversation?” she asked. “Being alive is the cost of doing business.”

For Pacific Island workplaces — where high rates of migration, caregiving burdens and cultural silence around mental illness are common — Doman’s message struck a deeper chord.

Surveys show just 25 percent of Asian American–Pacific Islander workers say they’re comfortable talking to their manager about mental health at work, and only 35 percent feel safe discussing it with co‑workers.

“The stressors are more complex. There are more of them. What is expected of us — there’s more,” Doman said. “We spend at least a third of our life, if not more, at work. And honestly, I see it as a language we all need to know how to speak, a form of communicational literacy that we all need to have.”

She added, “It is an organ with a health, stress and illness state. So, I see it as maintenance of the machine.”

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Despite growing awareness campaigns, Doman said many companies still rely on slogans rather than substance. “I call it all newsletter, no action,” she said.

She pointed to cultural, generational and structural barriers that vary from person to person. “It doesn’t matter that you’re standing on the same soil or dialing into the same company,” she said. “We carry those experiences with us into the workplace — our gender, our sexual orientation, the family that raised us, our ethnicity, our culture of origin, our country of origin.”

In small Pacific Island companies, leadership often overlaps with ownership. In those environments, Doman said, the power dynamics become even more sensitive. “It may not feel comfortable or ‘safe’ to speak up to a leader who’s an owner,” she said. “Just call out that power dynamic, but then you have to give something in its place.”

Doman offered an example: “Even if you’re not comfortable talking to me, I do care about mental health. I want you to feel supported. Here are some resources that are outside our company that I think are really helpful.”

From jokes to offhand phrases, the way mental health is discussed in daily workplace chatter can set the tone for whether people feel safe to speak up.

“Have you ever really met anybody who said something sounding like, ‘Oh my stomach hurts, like I have Crohn’s disease’? No,” Doman said. “But what you do hear is, ‘I’m so OCD about getting this report right.’”

She continued: “My least favorite — trigger warning — the amount of times I hear people say something so absurd, like, ‘Oh, blah blah was so hard. I want to kill myself.’ How dare you say such a thing?”

When that kind of language becomes normalized, Doman said, “What is the likelihood that someone’s going to speak up in an organization where people say inappropriate or silly or incorrect things about mental health and mental illness? It’s not as likely.”

One of the biggest culprits of emotional deflection in the workplace? The word “fine.”

“Fine stands for ‘feelings inside, not expressed,’ and it blew my mind,” Doman said. “I was like, I’m never going to say ‘fine’ again, because that’s not an emotion.”

Instead, she encouraged honesty: “If you feel like shit, don’t say you’re fine if you’re not fine.”

That kind of emotional clarity, she said, isn’t about oversharing. “This doesn’t mean sharing a 30-year mental health history. This just means not lying.”

Doman made it clear that managers shouldn’t act like therapists, caseworkers or parents. “The goal is for them to be caring triagers, where they are keeping a general sense of their team’s well-being and to make sure that those team members get the right support if they need support,” she said.

“Do they need to speak to HR for accommodations? Is there just some acknowledgement of communication style or needing to change work patterns — if possible, not always possible?” she asked.

Importantly, “Managers need mental health support too,” Doman said. “They are the same species as every other person in an organization.”

She added, “Often [managers] have the overwhelming majority, if not entire, responsibility to support mental health in their organization, and that care is not often turned towards them.”

Doman argued that too much workplace training focuses on spotting symptoms of anxiety or depression rather than building conversation skills.

“We don’t want to train people up to be symptom watchers in the workplace,” she said. “It’s inappropriate. There is a place, but it’s not complete.”

Instead, she said, approach with curiosity and respect: “I’m noticing that you are kind of speaking a bit differently or acting a little differently. I don’t want to assume the reason. I hope it’s OK I’m checking in. Is everything OK?”

And if someone begins to share? “Don’t jump into giving advice,” she said. “Because sometimes good help doesn’t mean giving advice. It just means listening.”

Even small gestures can build psychological safety. “Little moments each day where we can incorporate these little disclosures to make it more common, make it more normalized so it doesn’t feel as infrequent or strange,” she said.

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