Chris Sharp:
00:00
Welcome to the A.I.M. Mutual podcast series on injury prevention and worksite wellness. I'm Chris Sharp and today we'll be talking about the importance of focusing on mental health in the workplace. We are recording this podcast remotely to match the times. So please bear with us for any unevenness in our audio recording. So often wellness is associated with nutrition and fitness where the benefits are long known and well documented. But new studies are showing that mental health concerns for American workers are growing and shouldn't be overlooked in corporate wellness programs. But can this aspect of employee health really be addressed in a work setting or is it simply too broad and complex? Martha Gagnon is a certified wellness practitioner and injury prevention and worksite wellness supervisor at A.I.M. Mutual. She can provide some answers and key insights to those questions and more. Welcome. Martha, thank you so much for being here.
Martha Gagnon:
00:52
Thanks so much Chris. Happy to be here.
Chris Sharp:
00:55
So let's jump right in with this. So just to start with a broad scope, what percentage of individuals in our country are impacted by a mental health diagnosis?
Martha Gagnon:
01:06
Yeah, Chris, believe it or not, we have approximately 44.7 million Americans that are battling with a mental health diagnosis. And to break that down further, that really comes down to about one in five adults managing a mental health diagnosis.
Chris Sharp:
01:24
Wow. Yeah, that's staggering numbers.
Martha Gagnon:
02:11
It's estimated that close to a half of those individuals really aren't even seeking any type of treatment for that mental condition. And what we're finding through the statistics with the CDC is that the most common diagnosis in the mental health field is really an anxiety disorder and that really represents about 40 million adults in our country.
Chris Sharp:
01:49
Wow. So I mean, what are the implications of facing exposure to a mental health diagnosis like that and how does this fact impact US employers and the workforce as a whole?
Martha Gagnon:
02:01
Yeah, that's a really good question. So, you know, many times people who are impacted by mental health diagnoses also are managing and battling physical health conditions at the same time. And so from a cost perspective for our country, what we really see is the cost of an individual impacted by both sides of the house, meaning the mental health condition, also, the physical health condition. Expenses are two to three times higher than those without co-incurring conditions. And so with that, we have about 63% of Americans engaged in the US labor force. And our workplace is an ideal spot to really take a look at this because who's paying for the healthcare? Employers are paying for the health care.
Chris Sharp:
02:44
Yeah. And I mean, but how can an employer identify what mental health resources are needed and then how they could benefit the employee population as a whole?
Martha Gagnon:
02:57
So with the numbers we just talked about, 20% of people in our country are battling some sort of mental health condition and we know that the majority of those individuals are dealing with anxiety disorders. So it's not a question of if a workplace is in need to address mental health or mental wellbeing with their employees, it's that everybody does. Right? Because you know, as well as I do, we all have times in our lives, like a rollercoaster, where things are going really well and then things are not going really well and we're living in denial if we think that somebody with a mental health condition doesn't come to work every day without that mental health condition. It’s still with them, it's still a part of who they are. And so, you know, I always say that the job of the employer is to really provide access and to create a culture of safety.
Martha Gagnon:
03:55
So the employee really feels as though they can work, they can be who they are and still receive support and balance the mental health condition with being successful in their career. You know, workplaces really can see great success with combining mental and physical health interventions. And there are really a few reasons for that. First is communication structures are already in place. They already exist within the workplace and the culture. Second is programs and policies come from one central team, usually within the employment structure setting. Thirdly, employers have the resources to offer incentives to encourage healthy behaviors. We see it all the time when it comes to physical health behaviors. You hear of employers offering incentives, insurance, premium differentials, you hear all of this. So we can definitely put an incentive for people who are taking care of their mental health along with their physical health. And lastly, employers can track progress through various forms of data. We know through HIPAA that obviously you don't just get any raw data from health insurance companies or your workers' comp insurance claims or any of those, but you do get aggregate data and you can look for trends within those sets of data.
Chris Sharp:
05:12
Right. So you talk about anxiety and how prevalent that is. Obviously that's something that we all experience and it can be also then a very serious condition for many. Where can an employer begin? I mean, how do you start to tackle something like that?
Martha Gagnon:
05:31
So I think tackling something along the lines of facing anxiety specifically is having open communication with your employees, making sure that programs like your EAP services are widely known about, educating your employees on what are the topics and the reasons why people access an EAP. Another way to go is providing spaces within the worksite structure for people to be able to work on mindfulness, to help them work on stress management. Whether that is a webinar version, whether those are meditation sessions, whether that is just a break room for people to basically detach from what they've been doing all day and to really focus on what's going on around them--It doesn't necessarily need to cost a lot of money and it doesn't have to be a full blown out program. There just needs to be items and places within the structure of the four walls that people work at for them to be able to take care of themselves.
Chris Sharp:
06:38
That makes sense. I mean, I guess another term that I've been seeing and hearing a little bit about is psychological safety and putting attention on that. Can you just explain what is that and how it might fit into this discussion?
Martha Gagnon:
06:54
So psychological safety, I love that term. So the idea of psychological safety is really that as an employee I feel safe to be who I am myself and seek out what I need to be successful and to be complete as a person and not have the fear of retribution. So many times within the employer setting, the employee often feels as though it's not safe to speak up for themselves, to advocate for themselves without necessarily having--quote unquote--a mark against them. And so for an employer to develop a culture of psychological safety is one where the employee can really advocate for what they need to do the best they can as an employee and also live their best life mentally and physically and feel like it's okay to speak up for themselves and that they won't necessarily have a mark against them.
Chris Sharp:
07:50
Right. I mean, it really, it does seem to be a little bit of a paradigm shift in a sense just because, especially in the US I feel like we're always, you know, primed and told that work, you can never work enough. You can never show weakness in a sense. And so this awakening is in some ways. It's a total rethinking of how we look at ourselves and our coworkers in the workplace. But it's a hard task, but certainly a necessary one.
Martha Gagnon:
08:19
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, it's a culture, right? Again, it's not flipping on a switch or flipping off a switch: We're going to be psychologically safe from this point on. It is a process. It's a commitment of leadership and it's a new norm that people need to learn to become comfortable with, likely over time.
Chris Sharp:
08:41
How would you say a focus on mental health in the workplace can fit with an overall wellness program and do you see that kind of as a natural extension of the growing trend of these wellness initiatives?
Martha Gagnon:
08:54
Like I mentioned before, there's a lot of structures that are already in place around corporate worksite wellness programs. And so, when a wellness committee is identifying what are the areas or topics they really want to manage and deal with over the next 12 to 18 months for their employees, you can go about the same structure you do for your physical health as you do with your mental wellbeing. There are many webinars, many educational opportunities, resources and tools out there. So, for example, at A.I.M. Mutual, we depend on the CDC worksite health scorecard. It's a great free tool that allows our policyholders to really delve into what's going on for initiatives that fit their workplace and where there is room for growth. And oftentimes there's room for growth around the emotional wellbeing portion. People are stressed out now. I mean, it's comical, right? You and I are recording this in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Chris Sharp:
09:51
Yes. Now, more than ever.
Martha Gagnon:
09:52
People are stressed. And you know, they were stressed before this, but they are especially stressed now. And so it's important to be able to adapt your wellness program to meet the needs of the employees and where they're at--at that given moment in time. So if you didn't have a wellness program that was addressing stress management, guess what? It's time to start addressing stress management because that's heavily connected to the anxiety, right? And that anxiety, I am willing to put money on, for a lot of people is connected to how they're feeding their body and how much physical activity they're getting every day. And so the beautiful thing about this, Chris, is it all flows in a circle, right? We want people to lose weight. We want people to stop smoking. We want people to get more physical activity. But guess what? We need to peel back the onion a little further and start dealing with some of the other stuff that's going on that is really inhibiting those healthy habits.
Chris Sharp:
10:55
Yup. My wife is a social worker and she thanks you.
Chris Sharp:
11:00
Well, thank you so much for all of your insight on this, Martha, and, thank you to our listeners for spending this time with us. Please feel free to reach out with any thoughts or questions you might have and be sure to tune in for our next topic. Martha, thanks again.
Martha Gagnon:
11:14
Thanks so much, Chris.
