Silence Is Not Neutral: How to Welcome Employees Back From Mental Health Leave With Dignity with Jennifer Moffett

In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Jennifer Moffett, a senior technology leader who has spent over 22 years at PayPal, a national suicide prevention advocate with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a volunteer leader on the Nebraska State Suicide Prevention Coalition, and a suicide loss survivor. We are covering one of the least-discussed parts of the mental health continuum at work: not identification, not crisis intervention, but what happens after. How do you return someone to work from mental health leave in a way that supports recovery rather than simply declaring it complete?Jennifer opens with a framing I use every time I talk about this with employers: silence is not neutral. When a manager is so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they say almost nothing, the employee reads that silence as avoidance, judgment, or indifference. The manager's discomfort becomes the employee's burden. Jennifer's 22 years at PayPal, and the deeply personal story of how they handled her own leave two weeks into her career after losing her stepfather to suicide, give her a grounded, firsthand view of what good reintegration looks like and what it produces in terms of loyalty, longevity, and genuine belonging.The episode is short, practical, and packed with things any manager can do next week. It covers how to prepare before the employee walks back in, how to have the return conversation humanely, how to co-create the reintegration plan rather than handing one down, how to manage the disclosure conversation with consent and collaboration at the center, and how to hold accountability without sacrificing the dignity that makes recovery possible in the first place. For more information on this episode go to Silence Is Not Neutral: How to Welcome Employees Back From Mental Health Leave With Dignity — Dr. Sally