Modelling against scarcity: an interview with Heather O’Donnell

An excerpt from an article by Lucy Perineau for the ENCC (European Network of Cultural Centers)

The full article can be obtained here.

Heather O’Donnell is a former concert pianist and a psychologist. She counsels individual performing artists and arts organisations on mental health, resiliency, health maintenance, and injury prevention and recovery. She also coordinates TGR The Green Room, a support centre for performing artists in Cologne, Germany, which is an associate member of the ENCC since 2022.

We talked to Heather soon after her organisation joined the network. She shared an article with us that she had recently written on the difficulties experienced by musicians after the pandemic, and how individual therapy alone would not be enough to solve them. We decided to start this conversation as a dialogue between our article and hers.

Lucy Perineau: Heather, you have two practices, as a therapist for performing artists, and as the coordinator of your socio-cultural organisation. How do you view the question of mental health issues and of recovery for artistic and cultural professionals through this double lens?

Heather O’Donnell: In the article I shared with you, I was talking a lot about the mental health crisis, which was amplified by the pandemic. Naturally there is a vulnerability in performing arts professions stemming from many factors: perfectionism, absolute need for peak performance on a daily level, and a high level of competitiveness. These are a recipe for an inability to sustain long-term. In the research on artistic professions you see heightened vulnerability to mental health issues like burnout and depression, and simply falling out of the profession. It’s difficult to track because a lot of musicians and other artists are very secretive about these processes and it’s still quite taboo to speak openly about the mental health challenges one is confronting. So this is one of the missions of The Green Room, to normalise and create more openness about mental health challenges in performing arts communities.

I think sports medicine is always running about 20 to 30 years ahead of music medicine and in sports it’s very common nowadays for a tennis player to talk about her mental health issues, or a soccer player to discuss a physical injury and the need for rehabilitation. But still with artistic communities you have this secrecy, a need to project invulnerability and strength. This is something that I’m trying to help influence though our organisation.

L: How to approach this on a more organisational, less individual level?

H: This is very important, because often a message comes through that if you are sensing or experiencing burnout, this is a personal failing or an individual issue. It is not a personal issue. All the research on burnout shows that it is an occupational hazard. It is like a factory where a faulty machine is cutting people’s fingers off. If you have an organisation that doesn’t have the capability of preserving people’s mental health, well, of course there will be burnout. Individual factors interact with organisational cultures.

So, the first thing to mention is that prevention is easier than rehabilitation. You can address burnout after- the-fact through yoga, or meditation, or all of these types of interventions, but that’s addressing it as if you would treat someone’s cut-off finger by giving them occupational therapy. It’s not as effective as preventing the injury in the first place. So, when you look at it as an organisational task, to provide a healthy environment, then you take a bit of emphasis off of individual responsibility. Of course, everyone carries an individual responsibility for taking care of their mental health, but when there’s a system in place that actively and negatively impacts mental health, then it’s very difficult to effectively carry out this personal responsibility.

L: What we often hear is: “The issue is that cultural and artistic professionals tend be overinvested”. And that factor does often seem to be present...

H: Well, why are they overinvested? Is it because they don’t receive enough money to live well within the structure of the job? Is there a need to show that they’re committed to their work in a way that goes beyond their professional responsibilities? Is there a culture that requires that? Why is that culture in place? What’s causing that and how can that be challenged?

L: You could also say that this culture of overinvestment is overarching in many, many professional areas. It may not be just caused by the organisation, right?

H: Absolutely. I think you tend to see this overinvestment in organisations where there is a sense of resource scarcity. You have to overachieve in order to maintain your standing within the organisation. In artistic fields, we’re conditioned to this. If you are a dancer, if you’re a musician, you’re conditioned from the first years of training to this sense of resource scarcity. This conditioning is not something you can just snap your fingers at and wish away. It exists and there are reasons for it to exist. You carry that with you. A lot of people who have been conditioned by their early training as artists and who might transition into operational functions in an arts and culture organisation will carry this kind of mentality into that. It influences the organisational culture.

This is probably an area where the management level could do a lot of self-reflection on the kinds of messages that are implicitly and explicitly sent out on overachieving, overspending of finite psychological resources, multitasking, taking on too many projects in order to keep the organisation afloat... really identifying how much one is sending out, how much one is dispersing these limited psychological resources. Can that be streamlined? Can that be focused? Can that be maintained within a sustainable model?

L: What else could the management level of cultural organisations be attentive to?

H: One thing I wanted to mention about that is the power of modelling from the top down...

L: I guess you mean showing by example?

H: Yes. And for a lot of people in the arts, there’s a strong need, for many reasons, to display yourself as a workaholic. To display your ability to take on enormous workloads. You see this in conductors, in theatre
directors, in so many people... You have to ask yourself, what is the value of overwork, of the kind of punishing spending of one’s own psychological resources? Why is that such an assumed value within the profession?
You addressed this within your first article, I think that it comes back to a sense of scarcity, that you need to signal that overinvestment to justify your position in the world of culture. But it’s really something that can
backfire so quickly. If a person in the administrative upper echelon is modelling care for their own mental health resources, for psychological resilience and longevity, this can help people in lower ranks, who might otherwise feel that it’s a necessity to overspend your psychological resources.

L. As a related example, I’ve noticed cases of dedicated directors or managers who actually perceive their job as facilitating and totally supporting the work of the staff. It’s good for the staff’s mental health, but then these executives just end up appearing as very tired superwomen, and one of the results is that no one in the staff will be willing to take on their position in due time, because it seems too daunting.

H: Yes. It’s interesting that you gendered that because there is definitely a gender component. I don’t have any data to back this up, but in my observations, I’ve noticed that women feel compelled to take on a lot, too much. It may be derived from the historical cultures of unpaid domestic work, and the assumption that women simply take care of all loose ends. Most people don’t notice, because they’re accustomed to the unpaid domestic labor culture. In professional settings (and probably also domestic ones), this is not something that can be sustained for many years.

L: Circling back, you were saying that it is the task of the organisation to cre- ate a structure that allows for mental health. What preventive measures are key?

H: I think that one of the keys is hands-on management, which means really getting to know the individual needs of each staff member, understanding the tasks and work plans of indi- viduals and creating individualised plans for each worker. So you have a toolbox at your disposal, and you take each individual and try to find what will be the most helpful, whether it’s psychoeducation, or realigning their work structures to fit their life needs, or addressing the amount of work they’re doing, the amount of multitasking, whether they need more focused work or more diverse work. Perhaps you have, for example, a mother who needs a bit more flexibil- ity in the working structure, as op- posed to a young person who has just graduated and has very little family responsibilities. So you’re really taking each individual and their situation and designing a programme to help them as individuals, not engaging in one- size-fits-all interventions. This is what we call in the psychological community a “client-centred approach”, and in organisational psychology MBWA (Management by Walking Around).

And then there is the aspect of normalising mental health issues. I had the cultural experience of moving back and forth between continents in the last few years and I was really interested in the differences. When I left the United States as a young person in the early 2000s, you wouldn’t talk about certain things like mental health. And when I returned to teach at a conservatory in 2015, people were regularly talking about “taking a mental health day”. In the US this H. has become so normalised that some people say it has really gone too far.

L. This is not really in the vocabulary here, in any case I am not aware of it.

H. Yes, I can imagine that if you would, as a worker in a European cultural organisation, indicate that you needed to take a “mental health day”, that that would be a professional liability. If there’s a way to change the culture in the upper levels of management, where perhaps that kind of language could be modelled, then all levels of staff would be more willing to share their mental health needs. Of course, you have to find balance so that it’s not abused, balance in which one can openly discuss the need for maintaining mental health, within a context that doesn’t derail the organisation or give it a lack of professionality or make people lose motivation to be there.

L. You mention motivation...

H. Yes. I was thinking about a researcher, Frederick Hertzberg, who talks about ‘motivation factors’ versus ‘hygiene factors’ in organisational mental health. I’m not sure if this is a familiar concept, but ‘hygiene’ in this context is simply: how much are people paid, what are their working conditions, how much flexibility do they have, and so on. These mental health hygiene factors are, of course, very important, but it’s also important to consider motivational factors. Is the work chal- lenging, in a productive way? Is there recognition of achievement, do people have a balanced amount of personal responsibility, not too much and not too little? Are there opportunities for advancement? These kinds of issues. So it’s important, in management, to balance ‘hygiene’ and ‘motivation’.

L: Could you tell me a bit about the work you do specifically in your organisation, and how it could be applied to organisational strategies?

H: I try to focus most of my energy on injury and illness prevention, because when you think of the clearest examples of disruption in an artist’s career, for instance a dancer who is injured, rehabilitation is fraught and the possibilities for really coming back to full capabilities are limited. It’s very, very difficult. Obviously the best is to prevent the injury from happening in the first place, rather than to start addressing it after it’s already oc- curred. So we have structures in place in TGR The Green Room to help artists with prevention – which is difficult, because no one really wants to think about preventative issues. So it’s kind of this missionary work of going out and addressing the importance of prevention, and also having enough space to really help people who are already deeply entrenched in a crisis.

L: What approaches do you not recommend?

H: I’m torn on the issue of psychoeducation. I think there is value in educating professionals about what burnout is, how does it feel, how to notice signs that forecast it... but I think when you want to do something productive in an organisation, so much energy and resources can be funnelled into things like psychoeducative seminars on mental health. And it can potentially backfire, because when I speak to people in organisations, they don’t want seminars on mental health, they want to be adequately paid for their work! So these kinds of educational approaches are very easy ways for organisations to approach issues and to project that they are doing something, but I think that one has to be careful about how much of the resources are going into this exclusively, without addressing the structural issues.

There is another thing I find within organisations. Very often when I’m pitching these ideas about mental health to funders or to partners, it’s important to embed it in language that’s appealing. No one wants to talk about ‘depressing things’ like injuries and crises, so very often I have to really adjust how I’m talking about it. I tend to start more in terms of artistic growth and artistic excellence, and balance that with these ‘more depressing’ issues, like risk, burnout, depression, frustration. Privately, the work I’m doing is mostly with artists in high-risk situations, either preventing disasters or helping them recover from disasters, but on the public side, sometimes I feel the need to focus more on artistic excellence and growth and potential for artistic research and so on.

L. I guess that that could be an issue for individual professionals as well.

H. In terms of mental health, there still is a need for varying degrees of privacy. Some people will only interact with my centre in very private settings. At the same time it’s important to encourage people to participate in more open, collective forums and discussions. That’s something that can really change the general culture, to encour- age people to come in, to participate in whatever mental health or other health and professional issues are being openly discussed, with an openness to exposing vulnerabilities. But it’s something that one has to address very sensitively, how much one protects and honours the need for privacy.

L. I would like to come back to this individual-centred approach that you recommend, how does that fit with the need for equality? How can one still treat all staff according to a set of standards?

H. It’s a very pertinent issue. When someone needs more support, how do you offer that support without appearing to engage in favouritism or in giving someone more resources than another person? If one has a baseline of human resources that are available to employees, I think
you sense where these resources are being drawn from. If the organisation has the space for discussions on mental health and how it can assist in mental health, and staff have certain options, such as taking mental health days, or things like this, if that pot is the same for each worker, you probably will have a lot of diversity in how much the resources are drawn on. So making ample resources available is something that can be seen as equitable and how much the people draw on them is then a question of individual needs and situations.

L. Any last comments?

H. As I was saying, I have two functions. I’m working with artists and arts organisations, engaging in these questions about prevention and rehabilitation. At the same time, I’m running an organisation. Reading your article about administrative work in culture, I can relate so strongly to the dangers, especially since at the moment I’m responsible for most of the administrative duties. As the director of a new organisation, I’m needing to take on most of the management responsibilities. So, I can really relate when people speak of burnout in cultural organisations. It’s so important for management of cultural institutions to thoughtfully choose to model an approach to mental health that encourages sustainability and longevity, and doesn’t give into the work exhibitionist model that artistic people so often feel the need to project.