Mental health has become a focus of attention over the past 20 months as COVID-19 has plagued the world. In addition to deaths due to the pandemic, overcrowded ICUs, and delays in non-emergency care, there has been isolation, burnout, depression, and anxiety about the well-being of ourselves and our families, and uncertainties around our lives. finance. It’s clear that some people in our society, including frontline workers, low-income workers, and women, have felt the effects of COVID more than others.
With the pandemic not over and now the arrival of a new variant, this week’s interview takes the temperature of mental health in the workplace with the CEO of LifeWorks, a human resources company that specializes in assistance plans to family and employees. Stephen Liptrap’s firm tracks mental health as part of its business.
Here’s the first part of your recent interview with Howard Green, host of Connexion, a new 12-part biweekly video series released with the Toronto Star.
Howard Green: Thank you very much for joining us..
Stephen Liptrap: Thanks for having me.
So you’ve worked in human resources for about three decades or so. Where was mental health on the priority list when you started in HR?
It is interesting. It was probably not there at all. I think we knew he was out there a little bit, but if you think about the only place where he would actually play, it would be depressed people or people who were absent from work. And how did you treat them? And then I think 20 or 30 years ago, organizations started looking for some kind of help for employees around employee and family assistance programs. But frankly, those really started with a focus on drug and alcohol addiction. And how can you keep people at work or get them back to work? I think they have evolved tremendously over those years, but it has been a journey over a long period of time, Howard.
Then we’ll get to COVID in a second. But during your career, you and I have been through 9/11. We have been through the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Was there such a thing from a mental health standpoint?
It could even be more. And when I think about history and events like world wars, like the Spanish flu, what you see coming out of them are implications beyond physical health that last decades. So we could be coming off COVID in the next, I don’t know, 12, 18 months, something like that, depending on how long it takes. I think we’re going to be grappling with the mental health implications for at least another decade.
TO at least another decade?
I really do. When you think about what was happening before COVID around stress, anxiety and depression, you think about what was causing you, call it social media, call it people who are in 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, worry for our children in the global workforce and what is going to happen. it will happen in the future and all that. You get on top of that COVID and the implications and people worry about losing loved ones, people worry about the financial implications. You tie all of that down and then force people to stay home and the implications around isolation and everything else. I think it will take a long time to figure that out and all the implications of what happened in the last 18 months.
So give us a read on workplace mental health right now, from where we started in March 2020 to where we are now.
Yes. One of the cool things is that about three years before COVID hit, we decided to start tracking (the) mental health of society. We just thought it would be a really good thing to start giving back to governments, policy makers and heads of organizations. Some opine whether we are getting better or worse around mental health and society. And we roll out the Mental Health Index in our key markets of the US, UK and Australia. And what we’ve seen almost every month since COVID started is an increase in anxiety and depression. Before COVID, that was seven percent of society. All the way through COVID, that was the 50th percentile. So 50 percent of the population since COVID has been equal to seven percent before COVID.
Massive. Absolutely. And still, right now …
Sto this day we have seen a slight improvement in financial mental health through COVID. Everything else has been kept at a very similar level. When we think of mental health, physical health, social health, finances are the only ones that have improved slightly.
And if you think about the beginning of COVID, one of the things that fascinated me, if you delved into the numbers, you would realize that people were mainly concerned about two things. They worry about losing loved ones and they worry about the financial implications. But the funny thing is, those two are at odds because (if) you’re worried about the financial implications, you’re going to be pushing. Let’s get back as quickly as we can. And if you’re worried about losing loved ones, you will be, let’s stay locked up for as long as we can. So throughout COVID, we’ve had people disagree with themselves.
And that has been reflected in the political responses.
Absolutely without a doubt about it.
So you mentioned some ways that mental health manifests itself. You mentioned isolation. You mentioned depression. What other things can you tell us that have happened from a mental health point of view during this period?
Yes. And I think if you think back and, you know, we talk to thousands of people every day through our employee and family assistance program, I’m talking to our clients every day and we have the Mental Health Index at the study. And there is no doubt that more isolation is seen when people are at home. No surprise. You see issues around what I would call physical health, people figuring out how I exercise in my routine, which also comes back to mental health. You think about the people who are dealing with not being able to reunite with family members and what that means. So all of these things are a puzzle about what we do every day. And then you dig into some of the data and realize that consistently during the pandemic, women have had a harder time with mental health issues than men.
This transcript of the interview has been edited and summarized.
See the full video of the interview in the video at the top of this page.
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Find more episodes of Connexion with Howard Green here.
Reference-www.thestar.com