Massimo Bergamini

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.

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.