Mental Health Archives | Massimo Bergamini

Victor Hedman, Tampa Bay Lightning, Mental Health Champs

May 7, 2026 Massimo Bergamini Comments 0 comment

We learned this week that Tampa Bay Lightning captain Victor Hedman did something most organizations say they support, and few allow. Hedman stepped away, just before the start of the NHL playoffs. Not for a physical injury — for his mental health, and his organization backed him.

_{Tampa Bay Captain Victor Hedman | photo by Chris O’Meara AP}

That matters more than the outcome of any Game 7.

We are getting good, in this country, at talking about mental health. We’ve even red-circled two months – January, for Bell Let’s Talk Day and May, Mental Health Awareness Month, for that purpose.

Organizations issue statements. Logos are changed. We tell people, often with the best of intentions, that it’s “ok not to be ok.” And that’s good, because words do matter.

We teach our children that early: Angry words hurt; caring words heal. But we don’t teach them everything about words. We don’t warn them about the ones we use like a coat of paint over the cracks in our lives.

“It’s ok not to be ok” has become one of those phrases. Necessary. Comforting. But it leaves the heavy lifting to the person that is suffering. Because the real test isn’t whether we say it. It’s whether we act on it when it costs us something.

Hedman wasn’t a depth player. He’s the captain. A Conn Smythe winner. The kind of player whose absence changes the odds, and in the series against the Montreal Canadiens it did.

And still, he left – with his organization and his team’s blessing — to take care of himself, after months of trying to work around something that wasn’t going away. His organization didn’t just tell him it was ok; they gave him the time and space to get better – on his terms.

My workplace wasn’t the hockey rink, but I’ve been there. The slow accumulation. The quiet accommodations you make with yourself. The belief that if you just push a little harder, past the next big deadline, you’ll be able to pause. Except you keep going. Until you can’t.

For a long time, I didn’t have the language for that. Like many people, I managed it privately and avoided naming it at all. It wasn’t until later in my career, when the bottom fell out from under me that I acknowledged my chronic mental health struggles.

That’s when I learned the importance of real, unquestioning, support. The kind that helps shake the self-stigma that keeps too many people suffering in silence and alone.

In the workplace, that kind of space is rare. Because most organizations still operate on a different principle: it’s ok not to be ok—right up until it affects performance.

Hedman and the Tampa Bay Lightning crossed that line. His mental health didn’t just exist in the background — it took him out of the lineup.

The team put a cone of silence over his situation and gave him time. And, when he spoke publicly after the series, his team said that he had done the right thing.

In his comments to the press, Hedman thanked a therapist who “has no clue what hockey is”, someone who focused on him as a person, not as a player. There’s a lesson in that: If the only version of you that matters is the workplace one, you will eventually run out of yourself.

We still struggle with that truth. Behind the good words and social media celebrations of mental health, the truth is that we celebrate resilience. We reward endurance. We quietly penalize absence. And then we wonder why people wait too long.

Hedman didn’t. He made a decision that protected his long-term ability to lead, even at the cost of short-term outcomes. And his organization did what most say they would, and few do: they gave him space.

If Mental Health Awareness Month is going to mean anything, it has to mean this: Not just telling people it’s ok not to be ok. But building teams, institutions and most important, cultures, that can act on what that requires.

Because the real test isn’t whether we say the right things in January or May. It’s whether we can afford to mean them in every single day of the year.

What Happens When The Boss Burns Out?

April 8, 2026 Massimo Bergamini Comments 0 comment

What happens when the boss burns out? In Canada’s nonprofit sector, that question matters more than we are prepared to admit. A 2024 YMCA not-for-profit organizations survey found that 71 percent of sector leaders experienced burnout.

Many of these organizations depend on their chief executive to do more than manage operations. They are entrusted with legal, administrative and fiduciary responsibilities. They are the public face of the organization and are responsible for staff wellbeing, organizational performance and mission delivery. They are expected to hold the organization together.

And they often do so under conditions that make that task unsustainable.

In many nonprofits, boards set direction but do not consistently provide clarity, alignment or ongoing support. Expectations shift. Resources lag behind ambition. Governance boundaries blur.

The result is that the chief executive becomes the one who fills the gap. They take on additional responsibilities. They compensate for weak alignment. They manage tensions between mission, resources and expectations. They protect staff from the instability above them while maintaining performance outwardly.

And often, they do this without clear direction, adequate resources or meaningful feedback.

This is the precursor to burnout.

And it raises a harder question: What happens when the mental health of the person responsible for protecting the organization — and its staff — begins to fray?

Workplace mental health has become a mainstream concern. Organizations speak the language of psychological safety. Policies reference wellbeing. Leaders are encouraged to champion work-life balance.

But there is a quiet exception — the chief executive.

In many nonprofits, the CEO is the only employee reporting directly to the board. They have no internal escalation path. Their support structure is informal at best. Their accountability is immediate and concentrated.

They are, in effect, the invisible employee in workplace mental health frameworks.

This invisibility is structural.

Statutes impose duties of workplace care, diligence and good faith. By virtue of their role, the chief executive is expected to understand what those terms mean and how to operationalize them.

But the current federal law says almost nothing about the board’s responsibility for executive wellbeing — how to recognize distress, how to respond, or when to intervene.

The result is ambiguity where there should be none.

In practice, the pattern is familiar: a chief executive begins to experience strain — gradually, often invisibly. The causes are rarely singular: sustained workload, chronic financial pressures, unclear governance boundaries or direction, competing demands, isolation at the top.

Over time, pressure accumulates. Performance may shift. Communication with staff, board or external stakeholders may change. Workplace behaviour may become sharper or less filtered.

From the inside, this is a system under wholly predictable strain. From the outside, it is often read as a performance problem — or a conduct issue.

In many organizations, that is the pivot point. Once framed that way, the system moves quickly. Procedures are triggered. Communications are formalized. Decisions are made.

What rarely happens is inquiry.

What changed? What pressures were present? What signals were missed? What role did governance play?

This is not simply a failure of compassion. It is a failure of governance.

It also reflects a deeper assumption that runs through many workplaces: that performance and wellbeing are primarily the responsibility of the individual. When strain becomes visible, the focus shifts to the person rather than to the conditions that produced it.

In that context, workplace distress is interpreted as a failure to cope rather than as a signal of systemic dysfunction. The individual becomes the problem to be managed.

That is how organizations begin to treat people as interchangeable, and, ultimately, as disposable.

Too often, leadership breakdowns are attributed to individual weakness. In reality, they are often the product of systems that fail to align expectations with resources, blur the line between oversight and management, and leave the chief executive to reconcile contradictions they did not create.

In those systems, the CEO becomes both the focal point of accountability and the least protected participant.

The consequences extend beyond the individual.

When executive burnout is mishandled, organizations lose continuity and institutional knowledge. Strategy stalls. Staff morale deteriorates. And critically, the protective buffer between governance failure and staff wellbeing begins to erode.

That erosion is not abstract. In many organizations, the chief executive functions as the buffer between governance and staff, translating direction, moderating pressure and maintaining basic workplace norms. As long as that buffer holds, governance failures are partially contained.

When it breaks, the effect is immediate. Expectations become unstable, pressure increases and the underlying misalignment is felt across the organization. What was once absorbed at the top is transferred downward.

The irony is that the chief executive is often held responsible for the resulting deterioration in the workplace — even when the conditions that produced it were created at the governance level.

These failures rarely surface. They are resolved quietly through resignation, settlement or separation. The underlying causes remain.

The law offers little help. Courts can assess conduct and award damages after the fact. But they cannot repair psychological harm once it has occurred. The damage is already done.

It is, in the simplest terms, a toothpaste problem. Once it’s out of the tube, you cannot put it back.

This is why the conversation needs to change.

In the nonprofit sector, workplace mental health cannot be treated solely as an employee issue. It is a governance issue.

And at the top of the organizational pyramid, it is a board responsibility.

That does not mean boards become clinicians. It means they recognize executive wellbeing as a condition of organizational health, align clear expectations with resources, and understand that leadership sustainability is not optional.

Organizations that get this right tend to get other things right as well. They understand that performance is not only what gets delivered, but how and at what cost. They get the job done and deliver value for their members and their funders.

In those organizations, mental health is not a separate conversation. It is part of governance. It is part of board leadership and accountability.

So again: What happens when the boss burns out?

In too many nonprofit organizations, nothing until something breaks. And by then, the system has already failed the very people it depends on.