Evidence-informed articles on recognising distress, holding a steady conversation, and knowing when to escalate — for HR, customer-facing teams, and anyone supporting someone who's struggling.
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You can carry it. You just cannot carry all of it. The hardship advisor who takes a call with someone who is feeling suicidal, then answers the next call a few minutes later. The HR partner who delivers six redundancies before lunch. The family lawyer whose client cries in every meeting. They are good at...
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“Be more resilient” was never a plan. For a decade, resilience training was the default answer to workplace stress. Teach people to bounce back. Run a session on mindset. Hand out the wellbeing app. It made sense when the problem was framed as individual. It makes less sense now that the law frames it as...
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Nobody is trained for the moment someone cries in a meeting. A team member breaks down in a one-on-one meeting. A customer goes from calm to furious in a sentence. A colleague says, quietly, that they do not see the point anymore. Most people respond in one of three ways. They brush it off. They...
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Both are good. They are not the same thing. Mental Health First Aid has trained more than a million people globally and it does what it says: it teaches people to recognise the signs of mental health problems and guide someone towards help. CALM Conversations does something different. It trains people to hold the conversation...
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The hardship call is never just about money. Behind the missed repayment there is a diagnosis, a redundancy, a separation, a gambling problem, a death in the family. Hardship advisors know this. They hear it every day. What they often do not have is a way to respond to it that keeps the customer safe,...
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The script ran out three sentences ago. A customer calls about a missed payment. Two minutes in, it is not about the payment. It is about the job they lost, the partner who left, the kids they cannot feed. They are shouting. Then they are crying. Then they say something that stops the room. Scripts...
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A code of practice used to be guidance. In NSW, it is now the benchmark. On 1 July 2026, section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW) took effect. Approved codes of practice, including the code on managing psychosocial hazards at work, became legally enforceable compliance benchmarks. What that means in plain...
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State by state: what changed and when The national picture is harmonised, but the detail varies. New South Wales. From 1 July 2026, approved Codes of Practice in NSW became legally enforceable compliance benchmarks under section 26A of the WHS Act. The psychosocial code is now effectively the law in NSW, not just guidance. Victoria....
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Across finance, insurance, housing, healthcare, legal services and community support, many professionals working directly with clients are noticing that conversations about money are becoming increasingly complex, with financial problems deeply intertwined with emotional distress, hopelessness and deteriorating mental health. Cost-of-living pressures are not simply creating economic hardship. For many, they are also eroding stability, identity,...
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