Media Mental Health: A Conversation With Kelly Orchard

May is Mental Health Month Awareness month. In broadcasting – an industry upended for many, especially since the pandemic – maintaining mental health has become an even greater challenge. Some of those whose jobs have been eliminated will never know life as it was once.

There are people who must find new jobs, uproot families, change careers, and for some it means leaving the medium because they’re “Done.” There have been lots of tough times in radio over the years. But when it’s happening to you, it is a critically tough time. History doesn’t matter. What matters is the present and how it will impact your future.

I turned to longtime broadcaster and licensed psychotherapist Kelly Orchard to offer her thoughts as to how those in such situations can stay level and rebound in whatever way is most appropriate and beneficial to them.

She said, “What these individuals who have lost their jobs are experiencing is likely symptoms of grief. Grief and loss are not necessarily about the death of an individual, like a person or pet. It may be the death of a career, the death of an industry, or the loss of a job. It can be about the loss of your place in a community.” 

Orchard pointed out that there are five emotions that follow traumatic situations. Those are grief, denial, bargaining, anger, and depression. The mental health journey includes an action that follows those emotions. Acceptance of the situation.

“That lack of acceptance prevents people from actually being able to recover, improve, and move forward. Radio professionals who have lost their jobs will find hope when they accept that there is life after loss.” She noted that we don’t go through the five stages in a linear fashion. “It’s sort of like an infinity circle where you’re flashing in and out. So you might accept the difference or accept the loss at a point, and then you’re angry about it at another point.”

Getting through the situation that you’re in takes time. “There’s no fast-tracking your way through the five emotions. You have to go through them. That’s what I always talk to my clients about. You have to feel the feels. I think a lot of people might be in that denial phase, that it is maybe it’s not as it seems or as bad as it seems. You have to think about what’s happening to get to the point of acceptance.”

Speaking from personal experience, being terminated is tough.

I’ve been terminated. It feels like the ultimate failure. It happened early in my career, and it made me question my worth, my abilities, and the situation. Was there something specific I’d done wrong, or was my performance just not good? It took me a couple of weeks to get my head on straight and put that behind me. I had to do that to move forward.

Because of having been terminated, that experience helped me when I moved into leadership.

I stress to those in supervisory roles that when you’re hiring someone, make sure you do a really great job of interviewing them. Make sure that they’re the person who will work best for you in this particular situation. You don’t want to have to fire them. When you terminate someone, you’re not just terminating them. You’re terminating their family and their circle of friends. You’re creating upheaval. Moving children and changing schools. It is a life-altering situation. Hire well. Terminate reluctantly. 

“I have not run into any executive who has had to be in the position of firing someone who enjoys it. It’s probably the worst part of being in leadership, which is when you have to let somebody go, terminate them, or lay them off.” Orchard continued, “It’s an icky feeling,g and this is one of those parts of your job as an executive where you have to take one moment at a time and breathe and allow yourself to have empathy and compassion for that individual whose life is about to change.” However, no matter how uncomfortable the executive may feel, it is worse for the person being terminated. Much worse.

I asked her to walk me through how you take someone from listening to their situation to getting to where you’re offering them advice that helps one rebuild.

“A therapist is different than a coach, whereas as a therapist you’re listening to them share their story, pulling out a lot of the symptoms of the grief that they’re experiencing, and hearing them. Maybe they’re angry, they might be in denial, they could be bargaining, saying ‘if only I had done this differently, maybe my job wouldn’t have been eliminated.’”

Kelly advises that letting someone vent is a valuable step in the right direction. You have to get it out. Venting should be to just anyone, but to someone you trust. 

She said, “I would encourage anyone who’s been in the being fired position to find somebody who can hold your ‘vent’ safe for you and not go spreading rumors about what you’re saying. You need to get it out. You don’t want to bury it. You don’t wanna leave it sit and act as if there’s nothing wrong.”

“The next thing would be that we’d focus on is your mental health, and how are you gonna manage it now? A lot of people need a little bit of time to breathe and recover from the loss. Others need more. How much time that takes is really dependent on your life situation. Do you need a job right away, or can you get enough severance that you can wait a few weeks? Can you afford to take the necessary time to recover from the stress of being fired, and get over the shock of losing your job?”

Getting someone to “acceptance” is what I see as the toughest part of the situation. I asked her how to get someone to that point so they can move on to thinking about what’s next.

“I try to ascertain what steps they’ll take to get to that point. I like to do a needs assessment, and you know, in management, radio sales, or programming, you want to find out what the needs are. If they can’t leave the community because their kids are in school, then maybe it’s time to go to another radio station or another media company in your community. If you can leave the area and you’re free to go, that’s an element we would want to discuss. What’s your lifestyle like? What do you want your lifestyle to look like? The approach is to determine if there’s a chance that they can look forward to whatever the next step might be.”

Where is fear in all of this? That’s a feeling that comes up often when I speak to friends and associates about the need to change jobs, or what’s ahead for the industry, or what the future looks like for people in our profession. There is a lot of fear being experienced in the world. How do we address our fear and the fear of those close to us?

“I say that fear is the number one obstacle to success. So, whether you’ve lost your job or not, you’ve got to learn how to walk through fear and face it. Fear is false evidence appearing real. When you can reduce the impact of fear and face it, you’ve accomplished something. What are you afraid of? Are you afraid of making a change? Are you afraid of getting out of this industry because you’re afraid you’re going to miss something? Are you afraid to stay in it, or maybe you’re fearing that you’re now a dinosaur? Once you can identify what your fear is, we can work on flipping how you feel about it, because that fear is a negative emotion.”

“Then we move on to Love. Do you still love radio? Do you still love the industry? Do you still love what you have done in the media business? Are you happy with your career? Yes? Then let’s find a way to either reinvent yourself or reinvent what you do in the industry.”

And what if the response is No? She believes that you have no business being in the business because you are going to fail. As she notes, it really comes down to facing your fear, owning it, and then flipping it.

Kelly Orchard is also an author and wrote the recently published novel Dead Air: The Day The Music Died. It’s a psychological thriller that centers on radio and terrorism. The characters are in well-known roles in radio, and the situations are relatable and plausible to people in our industry.

She says, “The story is about radio stations being taken over and losing control of their transmitters. I have all of the necessary technical experience, and I understand broadcast technology. Then I turned my attention to creating the characters. I had to make real people whose roles are familiar and relatable to what was happening. This is a crisis. This is something they’re gonna be very afraid of. They’re gonna have a lot of fear, and so I just started giving them a diagnosis. No character in the story is based on a real person.”

Most of us will see parts of people we’ve worked with in radio. Mike Harris, the Chief Engineer, has anxiety. The on-air talent, Jackie, has low self-esteem and lacks confidence. The GM is Roy Longley. He is somewhat of a narcissist. The PD, named Gunner Jeffrey, is the stable guy in the story. He shows fear because he’s got kids in the listening audience that could be affected by what’s going on in the storyline, but he’s strong. So what Orchard did was give each of these characters a diagnosis and then played it out through that. It’s a book about overcoming fear, and by the end of the novel, a couple of them were willing to make a major shift in their lives.

That takes us from fiction to reality. The uncertainty of the world as a whole, combined with a business that is at a point of adjustment and recalibration. Kelly put a beautiful bow on how we as individuals should think about where we are now.

“There are a lot of mental health challenges being faced by people in all parts of the business. Anxiety and depression, combined with the stress of what’s happening in the industry, are preventing people from being able to think clearly, to be able to come up with solutions to their problems. That’s where you need to start. You start by changing the way you’re thinking about your situation. Changing the way you talk about it. Changing the way you look at it. And when you can do that, then you can change.”