Exploration of contributing factors to mental health in workers and students

Having worked in the field of human resources, my publications focused on mental health and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Poor mental health has been reported among
workers and university students in the United Kingdom (UK). The costs of poor work mental health are estimated to be £87 billion annually in the UK. In particular, hospitality workers, who comprise 7% of the country’s workforce, are known to suffer from poor mental health. Likewise, more than a quarter of UK university students suffer from a mental health problem. Through a series of cross-sectional studies using correlation, regression, moderation and path analyses, I found that mental health shame was positively related with mental health problems, and self-compassion and intrinsic motivation were negatively related to both mental health shame and mental health problems in a variety of population groups that had not been explored before, including UK workers, UK students and Japanese workers. In my NLP research, I investigated the application of NLP-derived skills for career guidance and critically reviewed
psychological outcomes of applying those skills in organisational settings, through a pre-post study, thematic analysis, and systematic review. Two skills, the Disney
Strategy and Sponsorship, were regarded particularly useful by the small sample of registered career consultants in Japan investigated in Publication 1. My systematic review (Publication 8) concluded that while NLP may be effective for diverse psychological outcomes, there is a need for rigorous future research. Taken together, my findings suggest the wide applicability of the effects of self-compassion and intrinsic motivation on mental health, and the similarity of Sponsorship to the soothing system in the three emotion regulatory systems. The critical appraisal of my published works identified four areas that are caveats for understanding the findings and could benefit from further work: (a) Lack of consideration for established predictors, (b) Mental health variables being treated as a unitary construct, (c) Balanced discussion of positive and negative aspects of mental health, and (d) Lack of critical appraisal
6 of NLP. Future research should consider these critical insights to improve our understanding of mental health and NLP.