You receive an email with a yellow heart and meditation tips. Ten minutes later, you get an urgent notification on Slack about a deploy that failed and the pressure starts again as if that email had never existed.
In the tech routine, we become experts at monitoring infrastructure health, but often fail to observe the well-being of those who sustain the code.
It is very common for companies to use the month of September to talk about suicide prevention and support. However, what happens during the other eleven months of the year within squad?
Organizational responsibility goes far beyond publishing a post or distributing yellow gifts. Taking care of mental health at work involves looking at the size of backlogfor the culture of permanent on-call and how errors are handled in retrospectives.
When the environment is characterized by constant availability and disproportionate demands, reception becomes merely a marketing strategy.
Many technology professionals report feeling afraid to admit fatigue or emotional difficulty because they fear being seen as the team's weak link. There is a silent pressure to perform like a machine, ignoring that creative and technical effort requires genuine rest.
Below, I share a text that circulates online and invites us to reflect on the gap between what we say and our daily actions:
In January, João had OCD and was called crazy.
In February, Paula was bipolar and they called her crazy.
In March, Júlia was experiencing anxiety attacks, and people told her to focus on the present.
In April, Leandra had anorexia and heard people laughing and talking about her.
In May, Maria had a panic attack and was told it was just nerves.
In June, Pedro had depression and was called weak.
In July, Lucas discovered he had schizophrenia and was told it was all in his head.
In August, Daniel had borderline personality disorder, and people said he wanted attention.
In September, everything turned yellow. People began to understand all our problems and offered their support. They medicated us and published texts on their social media to back us up.
However, in October, they continued to call us crazy and weak. They also said we lacked faith.
“Your life is so good. How can you complain?” they would say.
In November, Pedro took his own life.
But he was so young. He was such a good person.
However, all that Pedro wanted was for every month to be yellow. For judgments to end and for people to truly understand that psychological problems are not our choice and that we need help—not just in September, but in every month.
So, starting today, make September Yellow present in every day of the year, because right now you could be standing by a Pedro and not know it.
We need to talk about mental health when systems are stable, but also when deadlines are tight. Supporting vulnerability is a daily task for leaders and colleagues, requiring empathy to move beyond seasonal campaigns and into daily meetings.
A healthy work environment is one that recognizes the professional is, above all, a person.
How have you been perceiving the difference between awareness campaigns and the reality of your professional routine?
If this topic makes sense for you or your team, we can discuss how to build more human and less exhausting workspaces.