The month of May is recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month, which has been observed and promoted as early as 1949. Online mental health training can help to promote this important topic for individuals and companies.
Through this initiative, employers and organizations have shared that mental health is something everyone should care about. According to the American Psychiatric Association, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. adults experience some form of mental illness. That’s more than cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes combined.
It spurs on the questions: How can we go from best practices to “better” practices while strategically positioning individuals, teams, and the organization for a competitive advantage that allows everyone to thrive? Why does any of this even matter?
What if we told you that depression alone costs U.S. employers an estimated $44 billion annually in lost productivity? The Mental Hygiene Project® believes that mental health awareness should be continuous, and not just observed during one particular month.
Yet, May should be used as a time for organizational management to evaluate current practices, discover ideas on how to elevate mental health and resilience training programs, benefits, and invest in leadership development to create a ready and resilient workforce.
The modern workforce can no longer keep mental health in the shadows. We must make the invisible, visible and begin defining a culture of total employee health, rather than defaulting to cultures of instability, toxicity, and uncertainty.
One way to achieve an inclusive workforce where everyone is expected to belong is to ensure that individuals exhibit healthy leadership. Healthy leadership refers to a leadership style that focuses on the health and well-being of organization members. If you’re interested in receiving our technical paper on healthy leadership, please email us at michael@mentalhygieneproject.com. This technical paper was written by our Director of Research and Learning, Dr. Shannon Taylor, Ph.D.
