Creating safe spaces to discuss mental health at work

Sharon Fekete's struggles, personally and as a boss, laid the seeds for advocating for more attention to mental health in the workplace

Sharon Fekete

Growing up on Long Island, the daughter of Irish immigrants, Sharon Fekete’s childhood was a mix of the “old world” and the new, the innocence and joyful celebrations of her extended Catholic family and the temptations of American life in the ‘70s. Chubby but athletic and extremely self-conscious about her adolescent acne, she relied on jokes and her quick wit to gain acceptance and popularity with her peers.

“It was almost like I was in Ireland in my home, but I was living in New York,” says Fekete, who now lives in the Tampa Bay area.  “It was big Irish Catholic family -- every weekend a wedding, a funeral, a baptism, a christening -- and then I had a second pair of clothes I put in my backpack to change into when I wasn’t home. So yeah, it was like two different lives.”

By the time she entered high school, that dichotomy was mirrored within herself. On the outside she was best friends with the most popular girl in class and dating someone who was also considered a catch. But inside, she felt “horrible about myself, and that kept changing right along with the hormones.” She caked as much makeup on her face as the teachers at her private Catholic school would allow to cover her blemishes and quit the swim team -- despite being a standout -- when her “’shoulders’ [a euphemism] got too big.”

Though drinking was often a part of boisterous family gatherings -- “We’re Irish after all, there’s always alcohol around” -- it was never an issue in her home. But experimenting with friends, she found that alcohol provided a release from the self-torment she constantly felt.

“I realized if I drank I would have more self confidence, feel better about myself and then I would be funnier and skinner and the acne wouldn’t look so bad,” she recalls. “It was pretty innocent in the beginning.”

That is, until she came home at 18 to a family intervention. “We think you might have a problem,” her parents told her, in the next breath advising her she’d be leaving for an adolescent rehab center in New Hampshire the following day. Fekete, who “didn’t really take it very seriously,” immediately went out on an all-night bender with a friend. Arriving home at 5 a.m., still drunk and high, she was shipped off to treatment but instead of coming to a reckoning, she dove into two rehab romances and found a “tribe” of peers who were, like her, “misunderstood.”

“I had a ball,” she says. “You know because you find your people and you tell stories and you’re singing songs like ‘Lean on Me’ and getting together and walking through the forest. I really did feel like I was at camp -- and I never got to have that experience as a kid. You get really close to these people you know, because you know their deepest, darkest secrets.”

By the time she returned home a month later, she remained convinced that she “100 percent did not have a problem.” She stayed sober for “oh, maybe five days” and then quickly relapsed. Within weeks she was arrested when she tried to use a girlfriend’s identification to get served at a bar. This time she was sent to court, where she “put my hand on a Bible in a courtroom and swore I was never going to drink again.” Court-mandated to another rehab facility for an additional 30 days, she had no idea that her sentence also included an additional three months in a halfway house.

This rehab, like her first, was more of a bonding experience than a wake up call. But when it was over and she was sent to a halfway house in Poughkeepsie, NY, the cold reality set in. A relatively sheltered girl from a “good” family in the suburbs, she felt she had nothing in common with the other residents -- drug abusers, heroin addicts and homeless ne’er do wells. She kept pleading with her counselors, insisting she was from a “residential” area and didn’t belong there and begged her parents to bring her home. At first, they refused -- they’d been counseled at Al-Anon not to “rescue” her -- but eventually they succumbed and brought her home. In retrospect, Fekete realizes it was a big mistake.

“Now I’m back home,” she remembers, “and there’s been this huge gap of time and all these friends I’d grown up with were in college or dating someone and I just felt like I had nothing going for me. It all started to sink in. And I became very depressed.”

That led, once again, to a rapid relapse into alcohol and drugs and -- “in the G-rated version” -- a period of blackouts that ended up with her in Detroit, Michigan, living with a series of ex-felons and drug abusers, using crack cocaine and “high and drunk 24 hours a day.” It wasn’t until many years later that she would recover memories of the trauma she endured during that time.

She had only sporadic contact with her family, who were frantic with worry every time the police called to tell them their daughter’s purse or ID had been found in a dumpster. When she did talk to them, she told outrageous lies about her “top secret work for Chrysler” and her well-being, but carefully avoided giving any information that would allow them to trace her. After a family member who was a private investigator located her, her parents sent airline and bus tickets and begged her to come home. She resisted, selling the tickets to fuel her habit.

Two years later, after suffering a beating so severe she had to drink her beer through a straw that barely fit between her swollen lips, she realized she’d had enough. She contacted her family and took a 10-hour Greyhound bus ride home, sitting next to “a very smelly man.” They were so happy to have her back, “nobody said boo.”

“Nobody told me I needed to get sober, nobody told me I needed to get a job, and everybody walked on eggshells,” she recalls. “I was home. I was safe. And that’s all that mattered. But that’s when the depression really set in.”

As it turned out, her last drink would come without drama or fanfare, and all by her own choice. On August 11, 1994, she had a Coors Light at a celebration for her mother’s birthday at a Long Island inn. She hasn’t touched alcohol since.

“I had my last beer out with my family,” she says. “That was the day I got sober. I was done. I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. At 21, I was completely exhausted from life.”

She spent the first six months after returning home deeply depressed and plotting the best way to take her own life. (Of the three times she attempted suicide, all were during her sobriety.) In desperation, her father who had reached out for support through his Employee Assistance Program (EAP) during his daughter’s absence, recommended she consult with the counselor he’d worked with.

“Sharon, I think you’ll like him,” he urged.

Knowing how much alike she and her father were -- stubborn, rebellious, controlling -- Fekete agreed to try. She began taking the Long Island Railroad and a bus into New York to see the counselor every Tuesday. The day her asked her if she felt suicidal, she felt an immediate flood of relief.

“That was the first time anyone had ever asked me that and, from that moment on, it was the end of isolation for me,” she says. “Somebody knew my secret. And he was the first person to get me the help that I needed.”

That help came in the form of a psychiatrist who prescribed an anti-depressant and regular attendance at AA meetings, which she still frequents today. She credits the combination of the counselor, the medication, the recovery group and “the love of my family,” with saving her life.

“There are not many things I can remember in that first year, but I’ll never forget when I knew I was going to get a pill to put in my mouth to help me get better,” she says, “ because that’s what an addict wants, something that will take us out of ourselves. I haven’t taken any anti depressants for 28 years, now, but I definitely believed what they told me at the time which was that I had a chemical imbalance. I don’t necessarily believe that today.”

That first year -- when there was no internet and not a lot of other options for treatment or support -- was the toughest, she says, but eventually she felt well enough to accept a part-time job with a law firm on Long Island. When a girlfriend from recovery who was working in Manhattan for a telecommunications company suggested she interview, she felt good enough to try. She worked there for several years, moving up the ranks to become a project manager, where she trained Fortune 500 companies on how to use their telecommunications systems.

“You know it was slow, but every opportunity that knocked I was going to take it because I really thought it was a miracle I was there,” Fekete says. “People in recovery that stay sober are pretty hard workers because we can’t even believe that we are alive or that someone would pay us to do anything.”

An ankle broken while playing softball just before 9/11 prompted another employment change. Fekete began consulting for physicians at New York Medical as a “solutions strategist,” eventually working her way up to Direction of Operations, overseeing 11 practices and 42 satellite offices. Recovery, now a way of life for her personally, also became a design for living she could apply to business.

“When there were issues within the organization -- doctors, staff, whatever -- they would send Sharon in,” she says. “And I really loved it.”

What she didn’t realize was that while learning how to live “in solution” was wonderful, it also allowed her to bury and ignore the trauma she’d experienced.

“I had a wonderful job, but it was a very toxic hostile environment and I was always stressed out, always taking care of other people,” she says. “I was stuffing everything down and it came out in other ways -- toxic relationships, toxic jobs. I absolutely had to recognize that I was traumatized. But I had learned in my culture -- and I know now that to be true about almost everyone’s culture -- that you don’t talk about your problems.”

When, after a decade, the company went bankrupt and, about the same time, she discovered her “boyfriend had a girlfriend,” she decided to move to the Tampa Bay area in an effort to start with a clean slate. She knew no one, but within six months had a job running a large pediatric practice in Pinellas County. She would work there for the next eight years.

It was during that time she met her husband online; coincidentally, he and his then 3-year-old son lived just a mile and a half from Fekete. They were married two years later and, through a quirk of fate and the connection of Fekete’s best friend from New York, their wedding ended up being filmed by the popular television show “Say Yes to the Dress.”

Fekete spent a lot of time thinking about her experiences restructuring medical practices and wondering why the environment in so many workplaces was so destructive. Everywhere she’d gone, she’d ask the same questions of the employees: How long have you been here? What do you like about your job? What do you hate about your job? How do you like to be rewarded?

“And that last one was when they’d cry,” she says. “There was always so much drama and toxicity because people brought all their trauma from home to work. I really understood that’s why there was so much chaos in business. And I started to feel like a fraud, because here I am living this luxurious life, working with these renowned physicians, going to fancy events, but no one knew that I’d been a homeless crackhead.”

One day, riding her bicycle over the Belleair Causeway, she glanced down and saw one of the dolphins she loves to glimpse in the Gulf. She took it as a sign -- a sign that it was time to come clean with her own history. She decided to write a book, to tell her full story openly and honestly, without euphemisms or apology, for the first time in her life. It would be called “The Broken Road to Mental Health in Life and Business.”

“I never used to tell anybody I was homeless,” she says. “I never used to tell anybody I dropped out of college. I never told anybody I smoked crack; I always said I did cocaine. So I made a decision, even in naming the book, to say the words, because that is just so important. If I was going to tell my story I was going to have to tell the deep, dark and ugly. And it would be a shock because nobody had ever seen me like that…they’d only seen me be very responsible.”

Her husband thought it was a terrible idea. So did several others she told. Who, they asked, among the high level professionals Fekete was working with would continue to hire her if they knew? She decided to do it anyway. And the writing turned out to be more healing than she could ever have predicted.

“When I was writing it, I was reliving it,” she says. “I documented it every day because I didn’t want to forget how I felt. I felt like I was changing every day.”

She released the book in 2019, on the 25^th anniversary of her sobriety. During the Covid pandemic that began soon thereafter, she recorded the book on Audible -- in a hotel room with the sound of seagulls in the background -- and released it on her podcast, to make it available to as wide an audience as possible.

“I really just wanted people not to feel alone and to know you can go through major adversity and not just survive, but thrive,” she says. “I just felt there needed to be more bravery in talking about it. I wrote the book for somebody else. I didn’t think it was going to change my whole business trajectory.”

But it did. Through her consulting businesses, 13^th Avenue Media and The Doctor Whisperer, she began speaking to groups about mental health in the workplace. What brought her whole story full circle, of course, was the realization that it has been her father’s contact with an Employee Assistance Program that had saved her life. That convinced her employers have a critical role to play in bringing the mental health conversation out of the closet.

“Employers need to have a safe place for people to say, ‘ Hey, you know, I’m not doing so great today and I don’t want to fake a cold…I’m struggling, I’m not doing well mentally,’” she tells them. “If we can’t do that in this day and age, in 2023, after all we’ve been through globally? People aren’t going to stand for it anymore. They’re going to go where there are safe spaces to talk about mental health. So every employer need to take this very seriously.”

And not just once a year when it’s benefits re-enrollment time, she adds. Employers need to empower someone -- not necessarily the HR department -- to be “the open door.”

“We can’t just say we have EAP or mental health resources once a year when the benefits package comes up -- and then nobody talks about it for an entire year,” she says. “You have to be willing to have the conversation, and not just during the hashtag months of #Suicide Prevention Month or #Mental Health Awareness month. I’m grateful for those hashtags because we get to talk about it more, but if you incorporated it on a monthly basis, if you had open conversations, you’d see a lot less turnover and a lot less people taking their own lives, I promise you that.”

Fekete now speaks regularly at corporate gatherings, conferences and workshops and on radio and television. Recently, a company asked her to speak, but objected to her calling the talk “Mental Health in the Workplace,” suggesting instead, “Leadership, Awareness and Self Care.” Although she prefers to “keep it real,” she gave the same talk regardless, with all the ugly truth of her own jagged journey. And, as it always does, the telling provoked emotional responses and deep conversations that continue to fuel her advocacy.

“That’s why I do it and if I’m at a place where somebody doesn’t want to hear the words ‘mental health,’ I just feel like ‘Shame on you,’ at this stage,” she shrugs.

 “I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about anything else except being able to help that one person that is struggling. As cheesy and cliché as that sounds, that has always been my truth. So I hope to continue never forgetting where I came from. I’m still going to reach out my hand to somebody else because, how dare I not do that? There were so many people who helped me along the way.”

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