On being well

Compared to April 2019, calls to the NJ Mental Health Cares hotline and the NJHopeLine were up 37% in April 2020 when residents were in the earliest and deadliest throes of the pandemic. Statistics from hotlines around the country showed similar increases as the pandemic and its effects—public health challenges, economic issues, isolation—compounded.

Employers should take the challenges of this past year as impetus to bring mental health into the workplace, a panel of experts explained during the NJBIZ Mental Health in the Workplace panel on July 27.

How to get people to ask for help is “the million-dollar question,” said Hackensack Meridian Health Chief Wellness Officer Dr. Amy Frieman.

“For a lot of people, it’s really — it’s human nature that we should just be stoic. We should just put our heads down, and we should power through it, even if we’re struggling … everybody else seems to be coping with this, right? Everybody else is doing just fine, so what’s wrong with me?”

Frieman, whose industry’s employees were particularly hard hit by the traumas of the COVID pandemic as frontline workers, said employers can step up and break through the stigma of asking for help by simply giving workers the chance to talk.

“It’s about doing listening groups and it’s about doing facilitated sessions for team members, because people need to share their experiences. We’ve done a lot of change management sessions and I think the whole goal of all of this is helping people to understand that they are definitely not alone,” Frieman said.

Frieman was joined on the panel by Penn Medicine Princeton House Director of Outpatient Services and Director of Addiction Services Nicole Orro, and Baker Street Behavioral Health Founding Partner and CEO Dr. Joe Galasso.

Galasso said his clinic had an uptick in calls from legal and financial services sector employees over the pandemic because their jobs never slowed down, and they had fallen into substance use or into a pattern of depression. In response, Baker Street worked with various New Jersey employers to set up psychology groups within their firms. Adding a mental health component to the inner workings of a business is “rethinking within your organization,” he said, and it doesn’t just have a selfless, supportive purpose. It makes business sense, too.

“We just can’t say we’re not going to deal with this. We have to have a conversation about how to deal with this, and that’s the best thing we could do, because not having that conversation is going to sink your business because people will ultimately leave if they don’t feel cared for,” Galasso said.

The panelists said employers should also consider offering mental health benefits such as an employee assistance program, which is a work-based counseling program where employees put forth the problems they’re facing to try to work through them.

First thing’s first, though: Before getting people to work through their issues, Orro said they need to be aware it’s offered.

“They may understand the dentistry piece of [the insurance they’re offered], but they may not understand what it means to have an intensive outpatient benefit, or a medication management benefit. One of the key elements is going to be as an employee being able to access human resources and whatever online portals there are to be able to see [what benefits they can use] to access [mental health services],” Orro said.

Proactively make that information available to the employees that are going to be needing them, she said. Wellbeing is multi-dimensional, noted Frieman: “It’s not just mental health and physical health. It’s social and emotional health, it’s the environment that create around our team.”

For small and large firms, forging partnerships with local wellness businesses is a good opportunity to promote wellness among employees. Maybe the yoga studio or hair salon down the street will be willing to partner and offer discounted services to employees, or maybe they already do offer free or discounted services, and employees just need to an employer to highlight that for them.

“I think there are ways to integrate [wellness] in and really the the purpose of it is to have that holistic approach. It’s not just coming in, doing your job, going home, it’s being able to have wellness everywhere. That’s one thing that I think we really learned obviously this past year and a half,” Orro said.

Galasso noted that many business owners are in a bind now trying to get their employees back to work, and that offering wellness amenities would be a challenge for a business that can’t afford them. “But they are really also important, because those are the things that make us feel good. Those are the things that would feed us as employees. Those are the things that would you know make us feel better and they would help us blow off steam, and when your body is healthy, that would push you through your hard work week,” he said.

Some consideration

What’s been so unique about the COVID pandemic, Orro noted, “was the lack of literal safety that each person experienced on all different levels.” Whether that trauma was experienced as a physician on the front lines in the emergency room at a hospital, or it was experienced as a child who looked around and suddenly got a “message that your world is not very safe” by the masks everyone had to wear, or trauma experienced due to financial hardship, job loss, or death of a loved one, it was “pretty traumatic and it was chronic,” she said.

With that in mind, how can manager or employer resistance to considering mental health challenges when dealing with employee performance issues be addressed? It comes down to understanding the resistance—is it being uncomfortable with mental health issues due to personal experience, or is it just not knowing how do address it?—and to education, Frieman explained.

“We’re certainly not trying to turn all of our leaders and managers into mental health professionals, but we are trying to give them some of the basics of psychological first aid … it’s about recognizing the signs and symptoms of distress, number one, and then it’s about knowing what to do when somebody walks into my office and they are distressed or I’m seeing a team member who is usually so engaged…who is now showing up late,” she said.

The education, she said, serves two purposes: It helps managers and employers recognize mental health challenges in their team members, and at the same time helps recognize signs of distress within themselves.