FALL RIVER: Pascal Atkin has just the service that businesses unsure with how to deal with mental health could utilize.
Mindful Care Consulting & Education was started in July 2019 while Atkin and her three children lived in the Truro area. After the family moved to Fall River in December she’s reaching out to employers in the area to see how she can help them and their employees out.
“I try to be proactive and encourage businesses to work with me before there is an issue,” said Atkin outside a Fall River coffee shop on a beautiful September morning. “Mindful Care is a resource for businesses that are struggling with mental health and helping them navigate how to handle things.”
She offers a workshop called Stress Resilience that teaches people how to understand the true nature of their stress and how to stop letting it run their lives. The course is offered monthly online and is also available in -person or online to businesses who want to educate and support their employees.
Atkin said she doesn’t believe she’s ever had a job where everybody she’s worked with wasn’t stressed out.
“I worked my first job in a convenience store; I’ve worked in bartending; customer service in various places; then I went to university; followed by working in group homes for people with mental challenges,” she said. ‘It seems my coworkers everywhere are stressed out, and people’s most common response to ‘how was work today’ is to say it was stressful.
“I would really like to flip the switch on that. I don’t think work always needs to be stressful. I think we let it be stressful by the way we react to our stress.”
She said people react to stress in a way that it perpetuates it and it doesn’t help anyone out.
“Stress can get the best of us,” said Atkin.
Atkin said what she sees now is businesses dealing with mental health problems after their staff are already struggling and need counselling or stress leave, reacting to issues instead of being proactive, or donating to mental health funds without truly supporting mental health in the workplace.
“We’re not actually making the employees feel comfortable in talking to their employers in regard to mental health,” said Atkin. “I don’t want that to be a problem. I want that to be an open conversation, Mindful Care will give you the education and tools to support this and your employees.”
She said it’s hard for people to talk to the ones they work for, so that is why Atkin’s focus is on the employers.
“I really feel the employers want to be open about mental health. They want their employees to be comfortable talking to them,” she said, continuing “but it’s kind of like we don’t talk about it until it’s a problem so employees are hesitant to reach out for help and go to the boss and say they’re stressed.
“I think if we just trained our employees Stress Resilience from the get-go, they know it’s an open conversation and they have some tools in their pockets to deal with it.”
To find out more information on Atkin’s business, checkout her website at https://www.mindfulcareconsulting.com/. She is eager to support Fall River and area employees and employers.
