Desi Vlahos is a senior lecturer with ACAP’s Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice and a world leader in mental health first aid. She says mental wellness at work is now an obligation.
ACAP lecturer Desi Vlahos gives the term ‘multi-hyphenate’ a new meaning.
She is a lawyer, senior lecturer in ACAP’s Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice (GDLP), a mental wellbeing consultant, a director of the Minds Count Foundation and co-chair of the International Bar Association’s Professional Wellbeing Commission at an international level.
In 2021 and 2022, she was named the Lawyers’ Weekly Women in Law Wellness Advocate of the Year, and she is also a mental health first aid practitioner.
So how did a high-powered lawyer in Melbourne become a world leader in mental wellbeing in the workplace?
Desi said it all began when a group of her students doing practical legal training worked on the 2018 Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry.
“I saw a lot of my graduates that year start off bright and sparkly and then start to deteriorate over that period of time due to unreasonable work demands,” she said.
“[This] triggered a real interest into unearthing some of the key stressors in the legal profession.”
Five years ago, understanding of workplace mental health was far behind where it is today.
"People were still wrangling with this nebulous concept of ‘mental health and wellbeing’ that seemed to be related to fitness, fruit bowls and yoga. I think it's when we started transitioning the language to psychological health and safety that it became a lot more tangible."
When Desi began to examine legal workplaces, she discovered key risks including high workloads, long hours, tight deadlines and exposure to vicarious trauma. She said the industry was lagging behind other sectors in workplace wellbeing.
“In parallel industries, things like mining and construction, they were doing a much better job, so I started doing some research,” she said.
“I thought to myself, ‘How is it that in a profession like the law, where you’re held to such high ethical standards, we haven’t evolved our approach to psychosocial risk management in the way other industries like mining and construction have?’.”
So, Desi took action. She became a certified mental health first aid trainer and founded a workplace health and wellbeing consultancy firm, Wellceum.
Now she advises companies on how to strengthen their management of psychosocial risks in the workplace, and she passes on her knowledge to her students at ACAP.
“I always bring my students back to the recognition that workplace mental health is a shared responsibility,” she said.
“The employer’s got their obligations, but the individual … you’ve got your obligations too, and you’ve got to remember it’s not up to your employer to manage your mental health. It’s up to them to provide a safe and healthy workplace.”
New requirements, new penalties
While the provision of a safe and healthy workplace has been a legal obligation for a long time under national workplace health and safety laws, an amendment to the regulation in 2022 set out new requirements for how organisations should manage psychosocial risks.
Desi said the amendment demands two main changes from companies:
“The first is you need to now identify psychosocial hazards as hazards that may cause psychological harm that arise from the design or management of work, the work environment, or the interaction of behaviours in the workplace,” she said.
“You then have to create a separate process to control those risks posed by the psychosocial hazards.”
In simple terms, it translates to more than “my door is always open”.
“This idea of, ‘If it’s affecting you come and see me’ doesn’t cut it anymore, it needs to be much more proactive now,” she said.
"It is now a positive duty, so you can’t wait for a person to put their hand up and say, 'I'm not coping'. You have to be constantly monitoring, evaluating, checking in ensuring that you are protecting that person from the risk of psychological harm in the workplace."
She said companies now face significant penalties, with the amendments being strictly enforced after a grace period.
“The regulators have indicated that they will be prosecuting … [and] will be making investigations, so organisations need to make sure that they are on top of it,” she said.
When it comes to making change, Desi said the approach should be integrative, focused on protecting, promoting and supporting people.
“A colleague of mine shares a great analogy for this; any sort of positive corporate wellness is icing on a cake, but you have to fundamentally make sure the cake itself is a good cake,” she said.
“It’s got to be a good solid psychosocial foundational cake before you start adding those things.”
ACAP’s GDLP course, in partnership with LIV, provides comprehensive legal training for Victorian law graduates and includes a complimentary one-year LIV graduate membership providing access to mentoring, ethics support, professional resources, and networking opportunities. Find out more.