Mental health: Prioritizing access to services and treatment for employees is key

Americans are stressed. In an October 2022 survey by the American Psychological Association, nearly 30% of adults said they’re so stressed they can’t function and 76% say stress is impacting their health. All that stress is impacting the workplace and putting a lot of pressure on employers to provide greater access to mental health resources. Not surprisingly, increasing access to mental health services was cited as the No. 1 emerging trend among HR leaders in SHRM’s 2022-2023 State of the Workplace Report. And it was the No. 1 service added by Marathon Health clients last year.

Mental health has long been an underserved need in America, but COVID-19, racial injustice and social media amplified the issue and made it easier to talk about openly. While it continues to carry stigma in some communities, there has been meaningful progress in our ability to empathize and not see it as a sign of weakness or the result of “not trying hard enough.”

Creating access to qualified programs and professionals – and actually getting your employees to use them – can feel overwhelming for HR leaders, however. What is mental health? What types of programs actually work? Is an EAP or the latest mental health app enough? Each of these questions are top of mind, so let’s unpack them.

Related: 67% of employees want their employer to provide mental health support

First off, mental health is the perspective of feeling like you have the right coping skills to manage stress, including biological, psychological and social reactions to the world. When the amount of stressors in our lives outweigh our perceived ability to cope, we struggle. Recognizing that dissonance – regardless of the source – is the first step in taking action.

Fortunately, most humans don’t spend a bunch of time contemplating the fleeting nature of life. Major events, such as birth, trauma, change and tragedy tend to bring those thoughts to the forefront. Mass casualties of COVID-19 and major historical events of the past few years created a nearly non-stop flood of emotion that impacted individuals, family systems, communities and the world. From these events, many realized that the coping skills we thought were adaptive – technology, sleep, avoidance – actually aren’t. After the first few months of lockdowns, many of us had mastered TikTok, slept a ton and made more bread than we could ever responsibly eat, and we still didn’t feel great. Two years of self-reflection helped us realize we weren’t managing our stress as well as we thought we were.

Today, that’s caused a residual effect on relationships, jobs and finances. The biggest issues therapists see stemming from the workplace:

• Personal and professional relationships – with yourself and with the world
• Mood disorders, which include depression, anxiety and emotional regulation
• Functioning disorders like attention difficulties, productivity and resiliency

A therapist’s job is to be a facilitator and offer a safe space for individuals to talk about ways to reduce stressors in their life and/or increase their ability to cope with them. But therapists aren’t magicians and there’s no silver bullet – employers and employees have to collaborate with therapists to make an impact. Working with qualified professionals helps employees gain insight and skills to better relationships with themselves and those around them.

Here are seven tips to help employers increase access and improve results with mental health programs.

1. You can’t just say you care about your employees’ mental health; the quality of your programs and policies has to match. For example, employers should provide access to mental health resources and flexible time off to participate during work hours without clocking out or taking a personal day. Partner with a behavioral health solution that fits your population and provides in-person as well as virtual access.
2. Make mental health conversations part of your culture. Leaders and managers should share stories about their own stressors and what they’re doing to manage and encourage their teams to do the same. And you have to consistently promote the behavioral health programs you offer – it can’t just be listed in your benefits guide or buried in the EAP.
3. Employers need to take accountability for things within their control that are creating stress. Do you have a known policy or supervisor that is making the environment toxic? Make a change.
4. Implement a confidential workplace stress assessment. Review the results and actually do something with the feedback. You can purchase a tool or collaborate with your health partner to create one that’s tailored to your population. Quarterly is a good cadence – once or twice a year could highlight seasonal stressors, but four times should normalize what’s really going on.
5. Identify change agents within the organization that will watch for negative reactions to the topic of mental health and step in to change the narrative. For example, if Tom says, “Great, another dumb webinar about mental health,” then Robert can step in and remind Tom why it’s a benefit for the team.
6. If you have an in-house therapy solution, don’t put their office right next to the HR leader. Behavioral health is more mainstream, but privacy is still important.
7. Be mindful of the words you use to talk about mental health and don’t use diagnoses as personality traits, like “Mary is bipolar” or “Donnie must be depressed.”

The bright line between work and home doesn’t exist, so it’s nearly impossible to decouple life stress from work stress and vice versa. Employers are in a unique position to help accelerate the positive momentum around mental health by implementing impactful programs and building a culture that makes it ok to ask for help.

Erin Thase, Ph. D is the National Director of Behavioral Health at Marathon Health where she leads the design of its behavioral health service for employers nationwide. Dr. Thase is a clinical psychologist who has been practicing across the mental health spectrum for more than 10 years and specializes in mood disorders, executive functioning and attention difficulties.