Mental health in the workplace: 5 nuggets of wisdom
How can organizations proactively work to understand what resources are needed within their organizations to address mental health?
Mental health continues to impact employers and employees alike. As the conversation adapts and grows, how can employers proactively work to understand what resources are needed within their organizations to address mental health and how to best to connect employees to those tools and strategies?
Travelers Institute’s recent Leading Your Business Into 2025 event featured a star-studded mental health panel, where industry experts discussed employee mental health and what employers and co-workers can do to help their colleagues and end the stigma.
Let’s talk about it: “As a society, I think we have separated mental health and physical health for far too long. We talk about physical health and we are comfortable with that. But when we start to talk about anxiety or disordered sleep, we don’t want to go there,” said Marcos Iglesias, M.D., Vice president, chief medical officer of Travelers. “We need to get to the point where we are talking about mental health in the same breath as physical health.”
It takes a village: “Patients need someone who is overseeing or providing a kind of assurance and helping them when they get stuck,” Kathryn Mueller, M.D., M.P.H. and a professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the School of Medicine, University of Colorado, said from a clinical perspective. “It’s about trying to defragment it and having that kind of interaction where the patient feels supported; that’s something employers can do with the resources you have.”
Show you care: “You have to let your people know that you care. If I’m going to be influential or helpful to someone, I need to be able to show I have genuine care so that I can identify when something is off… sometimes the best way I can help is to identify, ask and then listen,” said Rich Ives, SVP of Business Insurance Claim at Travelers.
There are options: “Not everyone wants to talk about it, not everyone needs to talk about it. What they need to know is they can if they want to,” Les Kertay, Ph.D., ABPP, chief medical officer at Ascellus, said.
What co-workers can do: “As a coworker, your job is not to diagnose, you’re just there to pick up on some of these signs and point that individual to resources that you probably have, whether that is in your company or out in the community…but you have to do that with the undertone that you care about that person,” Iglesias said.
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