Miscellaneous
Guest Author: Richard Askam, Founder of Print Island
Every industry needs storytellers, and few tell the story of personalization better than Richard Askam. The visionary behind Print Island and a driving force behind campaigns like “Share a Coke,” Richard has helped shape how brands connect with people in more personal, meaningful ways.
As one of Mediaclip’s personalization ambassador, follow Richard on our blog as he will share his insights, ideas, and inspiration to help bridge creativity, technology, and personalization.
Richard Askam explores why mental health in the print industry is no longer a taboo subject.
The print industry has always prided itself on resilience. Decades of disruption, the rise of digital, the collapse of print advertising, and the pressures of automation and consolidation have required printers, publishers, operators and creatives to adapt repeatedly and without pause. That resilience has carried the industry a long way, but it has also, for many years, made it harder to have an honest conversation about the human cost of carrying so much pressure for so long.
With the rise of software providers in the industry over the last 10 years, this conversation has widened considerably, and I’m delighted to see that broader discussion now taking place. It is long overdue.
Mental health awareness has been growing across professional sectors for the better part of a decade, driven by a combination of shifting workplace culture, the post-pandemic reckoning, and a generation of workers less willing than their predecessors to accept that stress, burnout and anxiety are simply part of the job. The print industry, with its tight margins, shift patterns, physical demands and relentless pace of technological change, has as much reason to engage with this as any other sector and, in recent years, has begun to do exactly that.
One of the most significant developments has been the emergence of She*t For Brains, a not-for-profit initiative founded by print industry professionals, specifically for print industry professionals. The founders — Jon Bailey of Precision ProCo, David Rosendahl of MindFire, Jessica DeCola of GPA and Chris Minn of Digital Ink — came together not as mental health professionals, but as people who understood, from the inside, what the industry can do to the people working in it.
Their decision to build something raw and unfiltered, rather than polished and corporate, was deliberate. The name alone signals the approach, because this is not a wellness programme with a logo on a mug. It is, as the founders describe it, a safe space where people can share their struggles, lean on each other and normalise the hard conversations.
In its first year, She*t For Brains hosted virtual sessions covering burnout, resilience, leadership, work-life balance, and how to manage through trauma and adversity. The speakers have included industry professionals willing to share their own experiences alongside external experts. The format is deliberately accessible, removing the barriers of cost and geography that have historically made support feel like something that happened somewhere else, to other people.
The response from the industry has confirmed what the founders suspected: there was enormous pent-up demand for exactly this kind of community.
What She*t For Brains represents is something broader than one initiative. It is evidence of a sector beginning to understand that the strength it prides itself on, and the silence it has sometimes confused with strength, are not the same thing.
The print industry employs hundreds of thousands of people across the world, many of them in small and medium-sized businesses where there is no HR department, no employee assistance programme and no clear route to support when things become difficult. For those people, a community that simply says, you are not the only one, and you do not have to figure this out alone, can be genuinely significant.
The industry has a long way to go. Awareness is not the same as action, and initiatives need sustained support if they are to become the infrastructure that working people actually need. But the direction of travel is encouraging.
Mental health is no longer a peripheral concern for progressive companies to add to their benefits page. It is a central question about what kind of industry print wants to be, and what it wants to offer the people who show up every day and make it work.
The conversation has started. The next step is making sure it doesn’t stop.
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