Nancy Hill: Time for Ad industry to act on mental health

“You do realize you have PTSD, don’t you?”

As I began to absorb these words, thoughts ricocheted around like popcorn popping—“But I’m not a wounded veteran” was the most common kernel.

Most people don’t realize that post-traumatic stress syndrome is based on how you process a traumatic incident or incidents. And since it is uniquely personal to you, your trauma and your processing, it takes a qualified professional to identify it and help you determine a course of treatment.

Let me back up and give you some context, and explain why I am sharing my experience on Thursday during a mental health panel at Advertising Week.

I lived in San Francisco from 1997-2002. Think about that timing. It was the headiest of times and the darkest of times. It was the dotcom economy that rose like a speeding train out of nowhere and crashed just as quickly. The city was awash in money and so were the agencies.

New business was as easy as answering your phone. It got to the point that I wanted to put a message on my voicemail along the lines of “Hello, you’ve reached Nancy Hill at Goldberg Moser O’Neill. If you are calling about a launch in the fourth quarter, we are full up. If you’d like to talk about a launch in the first quarter of next year, please leave a message so we can get something scheduled.” It was that frenetic.

At the same time, I was married to a chronic alcoholic.

He didn’t present that way. Steve was functioning (until he wasn’t). He was working (until he wasn’t). And he was healthy (until he really wasn’t). We enjoyed our time ensconced in the food scene of San Francisco, Sonoma, Napa and points in between. We collected wines and pretended that it was all about the experience. 

At about the same time that the dotcoms began to show signs of unsustainable business models, Steve was diagnosed with late-stage alcohol-related cirrhosis. The first time he was hospitalized, he was showing signs of jaundice. He had been overmedicating with Tylenol and, unbeknownst to me, downing it with heavy doses of wine. Not a great combination for anyone’s liver. 

We went through all the counseling and doctor’s visits. We knew he needed a transplant, but we also knew the road to qualifying for that was a tough one. He needed to be completely sober for one year and be able to prove it. He needed to go through a battery of psychological and physical tests and then he’d be put on a waiting list for a donor. 

I found myself in the dual role of president of the agency and caretaker to someone who couldn’t help himself even though he had been told he was going to die. Steve continued to drink. I dove deep into Al-Anon and tried to cope.

The nightmare just kept getting worse. One night, as I was standing in our living room, I saw Steve come out of the bathroom, turn and topple to the floor. I won’t go into the graphic details of what happens when a human body goes into liver failure; suffice it to say that it’s incredibly gruesome and is etched indelibly on my brain and my psyche. He almost died that night. He lost more than one-third of his entire blood supply in a matter of minutes. 

He didn’t die, and he didn’t stop drinking. 

Eventually, Steve went into rehab (or, I should say, I put him in rehab). For a brief 28 days, I had peace when I went home. I didn’t have to worry about what I was going to find when I walked through the front door. And, while the agency was suffering under the bust of the dotcoms and the ripples that was causing with our other tech clients, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope.

Steve got out and went into a sober living house. That lasted less than a week. He was asked to leave because he was caught drinking cough syrup. I put him in a motel until I could figure out what to do next.

I wish I could say that the drama stopped here. It didn’t. And the tailspin caused by the dotcom bust didn’t stop either. Every time someone in Al-Anon said to me, “I can’t believe how strong you are,” I wanted to run down Battery Street screaming, “I’m really not that strong!”

I finally sought treatment for all the issues I was keeping bottled up inside. That’s when the therapist made that observation that threw me by saying, “You do realize that you have PTSD, don’t you?” Never in my imagination would I have thought that was possible nor did I think that the treatment I finally received would work so well. (EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, worked wonders for me and still does on occasion when something triggers.)

All of this happened in a period of about six months. I never really told many people what was happening. I just went on about my day as if all was normal. I never allowed Steve back into our house. I was moved to the New York office and eventually, I settled into both New York and a new agency. 

When Steve passed away in 2003, I was not surprised. It doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt; it just means that I had come to expect that eventuality. What was strange was going to the head of the agency to explain why I needed to go to San Francisco for a few days to take care of my husband’s remains when most people didn’t even know I was married. 

Again, don’t tell anyone. Just act like everything is fine. 

When I was being considered to serve as the CEO of the 4A’s, the search committee reached out to the man who I reported to when I was running the agency in San Francisco.

This is what he told the committee: “Let me tell you what an incredibly strong person Nancy is. She ran our San Francisco office during a tumultuous time in the business all while dealing with a chronically ill husband. She never missed a day of work during all that time, and she managed to keep the agency running when most people couldn’t.” 

She never missed a day of work. Lovely words of praise. I appreciate that this is what he saw in me. What I see now is that the agency world has a culture problem. It’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” in so many unhealthy ways. When you suffer from a physical illness, there’s no question that you need to do what you need to do to take care of yourself. When it’s mental illness, “I don’t want to know.”

We have to get to a place where it is OK to talk about these things. Some weeks, we spend more time with our co-workers than we do with our friends and family. We have to be able to ask each other questions like “How are you?” without expecting fine as an answer. Being able to accept when someone says, “I just need a day off to take care of myself” is just as important as allowing them to take a scheduled vacation. Measuring an employee on whether they can keep going and never take a day off even in the face of personal trauma is not okay. 

According to the Global Wellness Institute, “Wellness is an individual pursuit—we have self-responsibility for our own choices, behaviors and lifestyles—but it is also significantly influenced by the physical, social and cultural environments in which we live.”

Marcus Thomas has always had a flexible environment, built before COVID, that encourages our team members to do what they need to do to take care of themselves and their families. No one blinks an eye when someone says that they need to stop at 3:00 to meet their child at the bus stop. No one questions when your sister is coming in from out of town and you need to pick her up at the airport. We don’t keep track of vacation days, mental health days or sick days. 

We provide multiple ways for team members to get the help they need for physical and mental health. We have PTO for adults, which we define as take what you need, when you need it. We have 12 weeks paid parental leave. And, we have programs to help with stress management ranging from a free subscription to the Calm app to reduced gym membership fees and agency-supported affinity groups. This year, we also started focusing on our managers to ensure that they have training in both career pathing and empathy for their team members.

Here’s my advice to the industry (especially those of us who came to the industry when the norm was work above all): It’s on us to create an environment in which great work can happen. People do better work when they feel whole, happy and valued. That’s the environment we need to provide.