Because it’s high time to address employees’ mental health.
Thanks to the last few years of nationwide and global turmoil, many of us are feeling frayed: According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic alone caused a 25 percent increase in depression and anxiety worldwide. Add to that a fraught political climate, environmental worries, and recession woes, and you’ve got a recipe for declining mental health — which can wreak havoc on your professional and personal life.
Unfortunately, lots of us are afraid that addressing these issues in the workplace seems “unprofessional.” But Kathy Pike, PhD firmly believes that organizations should integrate wellness into everyday operations. While she has her hands full as a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry and School of Public Health at Columbia University, she’s also working to help companies address employee mental health. Through her work with the Columbia-WHO Center for Global Mental Health, she’s working globally with organizations to help them understand how they can optimize emotional wellness for their workers.
Dr. Pike recently sat down with Katie to talk about how she and her colleagues support these organizations — and chat about how our understanding of mental health has changed in recent years, common preventable issues that occur when employees don’t have adequate support, and even a surprise benefit of the pandemic.
Katie Couric: You gave a TED Talk 10 years ago talking about the stigma surrounding mental health. In the 10 years since, have you seen attitudes about mental health change dramatically? I definitely feel that I have.
Kathy Pike: Absolutely. Around the same time I gave that TED talk, I was invited to a multinational corporation to give a talk about mental health and mental illness. However, the caveat was that I couldn’t say the words “mental health” or “mental illness”: they were too stigmatizing, too provocative, too triggering. So I was asked to use the language of resilience, of coping, of wellbeing. Fast forward to this past year: I was recently invited back to this same company. The executive who invited me back had a sign on her door that read, “Feeling sad? Anxious? I’m a mental-health ambassador. Want to talk?” So the world has changed; there’s been a seismic shift.
Why do you think that is?
Clearly, the pandemic has been a major catalyst globally. It has made a clear difference in Japan, and it’s been a catalyst elsewhere around the world, including the U.S. But there were already some shifts underway. There’s no good time for a pandemic — I don’t mean it that way — but raising awareness around mental health was set up over the years leading up to this.
I remember saying to my husband probably five years ago, “I think there’s going to be a real breakthrough in discussions about mental health in this country.” I think partially it was fueled by young people who are much more open about how they feel — they’re not embarrassed to be in therapy. I feel that the pandemic accelerated this conversation, and gave even more fuel to a new openness about mental health, and about all the different things that come with emotional wellbeing.
Totally agree. Young adults and adolescents are much more psychologically minded, and they understand mental health as an aspect of human experience that we all need to recognize and talk about. I’m so bullish on this generation, in terms of their capacity to help transform the landscape when it comes to mental health.
What’s behind this generational shift, in your view?
Parents can take a little bit of credit. Our generation spent a lot of time and energy and focus engaging with our kids differently about understanding their feelings, and changing attitudes toward individuals with mental-health conditions. We were born at a time when mental health stigma was high, and I know our generation has been trying to change that. But I think the real flag-carriers are the younger generation.
Technology is also part of the story. It allows all of us, but especially young people who are natives to these technologies, to engage with each other. They can experiment with talking about certain issues without that fear of, “I live in a small community, so as soon as I tell one person, everyone will know.” That’s the experience that many people had in previous generations. So I think both the messaging, and the technologies that support this generation and the access to information, are contributing substantially.
This is yet another example of technology being a double-edged sword: The internet provides young people a platform for sharing their innermost feelings. But conversely, the internet and social media also seem responsible for some of these very mental health issues that we’re now trying to tackle.
Today’s technology raises really serious issues for everyone to consider, especially for groups that are particularly vulnerable. The way I think about the internet and social media is that they represent potential, which can be unleashed for good or harm. The challenge and invitation for all of us is to consider, How do we optimize the good and minimize the harm? There were a lot more people who died in auto accidents in the first decades after the invention of the automobile — when I was growing up, we didn’t have seat belts in the car. Then we learned how to build the machine differently, and how to engineer seat belts. Then came airbags. Now the entire design of the vehicle has evolved. There’s no question in my mind that when new technologies which represent new potential emerge, they don’t go away. Now we need to figure out how to bring them into our lives in a way that supports humanity.
Let’s talk about the toll mental illness takes on professionals: You have some pretty staggering statistics about absenteeism, and other mental health issues at work.
Work that’s been done by the World Health Organization and collaborators indicate that about 15 percent of working-age adults have a mental health condition. That’s a significant percentage. It means that anyone who’s in the workplace is working with people who, at some point or another, are managing some real mental-health concerns. However, the vast majority of those workers don’t get treatment. The estimates are that in the workplace alone, close to a trillion dollars is lost in the global economy due to untreated mental-health conditions. The good news is that the vast majority of workers see their workplace as a potential resource, where leaders can improve programs and policies that would really make a difference.
Most workplaces today are falling short of expectations, but their leadership is increasingly recognizing that there’s a real cost to their people — which is a cost to business. We have an opportunity to be leaders in supporting our workforce. Going back to this generation, young professionals have a set of expectations around addressing work-life balance and mental health in a way that’s resetting expectations for what workplaces can look like.
The leading cause of absenteeism in the workplace is mental-health-related. Interestingly, the vast majority of workers say that when they’re absent from work, they don’t report that the reason for their absenteeism is mental illness or mental-health concerns, even though that’s true in the majority of the cases. Absenteeism is sort of the end result of people not being able to engage at work. There’s an even larger group that engages in what has been called presenteeism: People show up to work, but they’re not able to focus or engage. They’re spending a lot of time not productively engaged. They’re present, but not present.
I’ve never heard of presenteeism. Is that the same thing as quiet quitting?
Quiet quitting has other layers associated with it. Presenteeism would be, for example, the parent who goes to work but is managing an enormous amount of stress and anxiety because he has an adolescent who just got admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Or an employee preoccupied by an aging parent who just got into a car accident. Presenteeism is about mental-health conditions that are keeping people from focusing on work. So they might be at work, but the door might be closed and they might be crying, sleeping, or making phone calls trying to access mental-health services. Whatever they’re doing, they’re not really working.
You mentioned earlier that many workplaces are falling short in terms of the services they’re offering and the environment they’re providing their employees when it comes to mental health. You saw a void and have now been working with companies to advise them. Tell me about what you’re doing.
We observed that leadership was increasingly recognizing that there’s a need to revisit how we work and how we support our workers. Employee surveys were documenting levels of stress, anxiety, and burnout that continued to climb. But there was very limited guidance on what works and what really matters in terms of workplace mental health. Organizational leaders were asking, “How do I build a strategy that’s evidence-informed where I can really be strategic?” There are many programs offered to organizations around management training and stress training and various apps and various activities, but guidance for companies on how to build a comprehensive mental health strategy for in the workplace was lacking.
Many leaders wanted guidance based on good data and evidence. We’re focused on supporting organizational leadership in really taking a careful look at what their organization is doing: What are their programs and services in terms of mental health, and how can they improve and innovate to have a real impact on employee wellbeing? We’ve developed an online assessment, the Mental Health at Work Index, and we’re currently in the mid stage of beta-testing. It helps companies get a comprehensive picture of where they are in terms of their organization’s capacity to address mental health at work.
They also get a benchmark score against all the other organizations that have completed the assessment. They get a target score — where they compare their organization to what “good” looks like. And it gives them a “red flag” score that tells them if they’re below a certain score. After completing the assessment, they get an automated report that also provides resources specific to their set of issues. Their auto-generated report is based on an algorithm that sets the top 10 priorities that they should focus on, to enhance their mental-health programs.
Do you then help them design a program that will meet their needs?
Exactly. Organizations complete the self-assessment, get the report and access to all the resources, and we conduct an expert targeted review of their results, to assist them with priority-setting. We work with them on targeted issues over the course of 12 months.
How challenging is this, given how much the workplace has changed? So many workplaces have a hybrid model, where people are working in-office two or three days a week — or not at all. I think that has presented a real challenge to employers.
This transition has put a lot of things in flux — a lot of old assumptions are now on the table for discussion. That’s challenging, but it’s also a huge opportunity. In large part, workplaces were doing work the way we were doing it, because that’s the way we had always done it. The world is different from when that work structure became the norm. As we talk to organizations about the Mental Health at Work Index, part of their excitement is that there’s an opportunity to imagine and envision real innovation at work.
Organizations are being asked new questions and being asked to respond differently. If they don’t lean in to addressing mental health at work, it’s very clear to me that they’re going to lose ground. The next generation of professionals expect mental health to be part of the story.
When I came of age professionally, oftentimes if you did go to therapy or see a psychiatrist or a psychologist, you wouldn’t submit it for insurance coverage — it was stigmatized and you didn’t want your employer to know you were struggling. Has that changed?
That’s changed dramatically, although there’s still a significant percentage of individuals who have concerns about discussing their mental health, because of fears that it’ll jeopardize their opportunities for promotion and work security. There are legal protections in place now, but laws don’t get us all the way there. We need to shift organizational culture. That’s true in the U.S. and globally. In certain regions of the world, healthcare covers a much more restricted set of issues and doesn’t even include mental health. Depending on where you are in the world, there’s still a lot of work to do in terms of raising awareness, building comfort, and integrating understanding that mental health is part of our overall health.
One of the reasons why it’s so important to get mental health fully integrated into the workplace is that the more we can understand the relationship of mental health to other health conditions, the better we will be in terms of addressing all our health conditions. When we’re talking about any health condition, the sooner you get help, the better your prognosis. We’re excited about working with organizations around the globe to help improve mental health at work — which improves health for all.
