What finally happened was that she recognized that her feelings towards our 2-year-old daughter weren't right. And, oddly enough, our dog. We had a fabulous, beautiful, well-trained Aussie, the best dog I've ever seen. My wife is a vet. When she started thinking of the child and the dog as both being problems in her life, that's when she recognized that she herself had changed for the worse, and realized she needed help.
There may be ways to go about intervening. Support groups with trained staff would probably be able to help. But I wasn't smart enough at the time to find one.
Also, remember that you're a manager, not a doctor and not a friend. Getting emotionally invested beyond your job role will hurt more than it will help. There is only so much of you to go around, and without proper training in handling this sort of problems you will run out of your own sanity in short order.
And you by the way seem very apt in considering other people's emotions. This dilemma you're posing would be hard on anyone to navigate.
Serious question, how did your team have that many people with these issues. I presume that presuming a standard distribution, every team would have certain number of people with certain mental health related issues, but if your team has more than others, then there must be some hiring heuristic which skewed things that way. Am I correct?
As a new manager who came in to manage a new team, I was completely clueless about many of my team members' very personal emotional baggage (everyone had different stories, but the key point is that everyone often made very negative assumptions and interpretations). It would require immense effort to earn their trust, but I had no idea at first. By the time I realized this baggage existed, I was already the enemy, the horrible evil manager who just wanted to fire everyone at the first opportunity; the only reason I hadn't succeeded is because of insert-reason-here.
In that frame, if I were to suggest that someone seek help, I think it would only be taken as a significant attack and increase the conflict? It's taken me a few years to get to the point where my team no longer believes I'm trying to fire them. I've been able to understand that they've all had various traumas in their lives (it slips out when they're emotionally upset about things).
I'm glad that your wife was able to get better, and I hope that she'll continue to get better. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions for how to make the suggestion to seek help when you're the boss of the one who needs help. Because I'm certainly no psychiatrist.
Similarly, random strangers who need help, perhaps they just needed that one person to nudge them. But too scared of creating unnecessary drama instead of having a positive impact. I guess the only easy thing to do is try to be kind to people and let it go if it backfires. It's better to say it's not my job, or it's better to be the Good Samaritan?
It doesn't help that my EQ is quite low (though it's higher than it used to be at least).