How Sanctus is bringing mental health coaching to the workplace

‘Burned out at 24’, James Routledge shut down his business and started a mental health blog – now he’s on a mission to help others who have suffered like him, writes Andy Martin

Routledge’s team of experts have partnered with over 90 UK firms (Tom Price / tomalprice.com)

Starting a mental health business doesn’t mean you have good mental health,” says James Routledge. “I probably thought it would.” The founder of Sanctus, which enables people at work to talk about their feelings with trained therapists, opened up to me about his own mental health issues.

Now 29, Routledge was born and bred in Stoke, which – as he describes it – is (or was when he was growing up) the last refuge of northern machismo. “It’s not somewhere where you speak about your feelings. I don’t think I even knew I had feelings.” He studied history and politics at Sheffield University, “but I was a bit bored and I wanted to try something different”. So in his second year, in 2012, he started a sports-related business, connecting people at live events – which took off, raising £600k, and he duly dropped out of college at 21. “The business was born of the frenetic energy of students,” says Routledge. “But in fact it didn’t have a clear reason for its existence.”

He adopted the aggressive start-up mindset and mouthed all the mantras, “Hustle hard, move fast and break things.” But on the inside he was struggling and had a serious dose of impostor syndrome. “I was scared of failure. I’d told all my friends and family I was going to make it. I knew it wasn’t quite right, but I pushed on anyway for the next three and a half years.” Then he ran into a wall.

“I was completely frazzled,” says Routledge. “Burned out at 24.” He shut the business down but it didn’t stop him feeling “stressed and depressed and liable to panic attacks.” And there was no one he could speak to about it either, no one among his friends or family who would be up for this kind of conversation. “If you’d said the words ‘mental health’ to me back then, I’d have thought, straitjacket, stigma, Frasier Crane, and are you in love with your Mum?”

But rather than bottle it up he took to posting a blog on mental health and start-ups. “I knew it couldn’t just be me,” he says. But he was taken aback by the massive scale of the response – 12,000 hits in a day. “So many people were feeling exactly the same way.” Soon he was being invited to speak publicly and was drawn into a cause and a movement and discovered “a new purpose” in life.

Which is where Sanctus comes in. “There was a problem I needed to solve. How to transform the perception of mental health, from people thinking it’s a form of madness to something you can be proud of.” In 2016 he was working out in the gym regularly. “I looked at brands like Nike and Adidas and I thought, 50 years ago no one was doing this, and now it’s turned around and we’ve reduced obesity and heart attacks. But we don’t yet have an eat-5-a-day equivalent for the mind.” He resolved to put the world’s first “mental health gym” on the high street, “where I could walk in as if it was Sainsbury’s or Starbucks.”

But so far Sanctus has focused on putting the mental health gym into the office space. Which seems reasonable, given that in 2018 there were over 600,000 cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety in the UK alone and mental health issues account for 54 per cent of working days lost. Routledge realised that millennials in particular want something different from work – and life. “They’re not prepared to put up with the stiff upper lip any more – the idea that you can just turn off your humanity at the office door.” He wanted to do for mental health what Jamie Oliver had done for school dinners and more recently what Joe Wicks has done for physical fitness.

Millennials are not prepared to put up with the stiff upper lip any more – the idea that you can just turn off your humanity at the office door

Routledge emphasises the proactive approach. “We don’t wait until you’re having the midlife crisis, any more than you would wait until you’re seizing up physically before you start doing exercise.” Routledge reckons that taking good care of your mental health should be as regular as brushing your teeth. “It’s not about prevention: it’s about improving your life,” whether it’s in personal relationships or finding fulfilment at work. All the things you can do to keep your body in shape you can do for the mind too. “Mental health is not a destination. There isn’t a utopia of enlightenment that you have to attain. We’re all in flux.”

Routledge has gathered together a team of some 40-odd “coaches”, trained counsellors and psychotherapists. “They’re more about the present and the future than whatever went wrong with your childhood,” he says. And he has partnered up with more than 90 businesses right across the country – such as Just Eat and Red Bull and KFC – so the service is free for employees. “We’re not a clinic, we’re not looking at you as a patient who needs fixing, only as someone who has feelings and aspirations and frustrations.” The name Sanctus is less to do with “holy” than “wholeness”.

You can meet a Sanctus coach for 50 minutes one-to-one in your office – or at least on a screen in your office. Routledge acknowledges that the pandemic has affected the way they operate. But the upside of the downside is that the crisis has concentrated our minds on the importance of mental health. “We’ve had the shared experience of being alone, scared and confused. What might have taken 10 or 20 years has happened in the space of a year.” One thousand people every month are getting it off their chest with Sanctus and “have a feeling of being listened to”.

In November 2020 Routledge handed over the CEO reins to Chris Slater from Simply Business. He found that strategising didn’t really suit him. The irony is that he was running a mental health business but struggling again with his own mental health. He suspects that a lot of start-up founders feel the same way, even if the subject is taboo. “I went from being someone who wrote a blog post to running a big company, dealing with other people’s lives. I wouldn’t have applied for the job of CEO.” He has now moved on from blog posts to publishing a book with Penguin, Mental Health at Work, due out in October to celebrate World Mental Health Day.

The other irony is that James Routledge doesn’t even go to the gym any more. He has joined Fulham Reach Boat Club and taken to rowing up and down the Thames instead (“they make rowing more accessible the way we do mental health”). And he is fitter than ever, mentally and physically. “It’s a brilliant sport,” he says. “Lots of fresh air. It’s all about finding what works for you.”

@andymartinink