Kellie Benson-Bray, Member Relations Director at LIMRA and Kim Landry, Associate Research Director at LIMRA discuss the increasing demand for mental health benefits in the workplace. Read the transcript. 

Welcome to Insider Insights where we dive into hot topics facing the financial services industry. Today, we're excited to have with us Kellie Benson-Bray, member relations director at LIMRA and LOMA, and Kim Landry, associate research director at LIMRA, to discuss the increasing demand for mental health benefits in the workplace.

Well, welcome everyone, and thank you, Kim, for joining me for this very important topic. So as a member relations director here at LIMRA and LOMA, I'm talking to members all the time about what benefits they want to offer their own employees and how they want to educate employees on those benefits. And top of mind for every single one of them is really mental health, the mental health, and wellness of their employees, especially when you think about the fact that we spend in the United States $300 billion a year on mental health and what it takes away from the workplace and what it takes away from individuals and the quality of life. So, talk to me a little bit about the prevalence of mental health as reported, amongst employees.

Thanks, Kelly. Yeah. We looked at this in the BEAT study this year, kind of as a hot topic section that we brought in, and we asked employees how often they'd experienced a variety of mental health challenges during the past year, so only looking at recent experiences.

We expected the prevalence to be high, but frankly, we were still surprised by just how high it was. So in our survey, 75% of U.S. employees told us that they had experienced a mental health challenge either sometimes or often during the past year, and 37% told us that they had struggled with at least one mental health issue often.

The most common challenges we saw were things like anxiety, depression, and difficulty managing stress, but we also saw a fair amount of other things like relationship or family conflicts, grief or loss, and also, alcohol and substance abuse.

Great. So, looking at that prevalence,  stress and anxiety seem to really impact the workplace, and really productivity, and wellness overall. So, what is the demographic of those employees who most reported those mental health issues?

That's a great question. So, first of all, age is a huge factor. We see that the rates of mental health challenges are much higher for the younger generations and especially for Gen Z, that generation that's just coming into the workplace now. Just for an example, 62% of Gen Z workers told us they had struggled with at least one issue often during the past year and that's compared to only 19% of Baby Boomers that said the same thing.

Another factor that we noticed, being a big, correlate of mental health issues was identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community. So, 67% of employees who identify as LGBTQ+ said that they had struggled with something often versus 33% of non-LGBTQ+ employees.

Wow.

 Yeah. It was a lot. That was one of the biggest differences we saw.

We looked at it by gender and overall women are 10 percentage points more likely to be struggling with mental health issues compared with men. And that pattern held up for a lot of the very specific challenges we looked at but it was, I should note, it was the opposite for alcohol and substance abuse. We saw that was a more common challenge among men. And some of the other things these were not quite as large differences, but they were still significant.

We saw people with lower incomes report more mental health struggles and we saw differences for a lot of those factors that correlate with income. So, employees with lower levels of education and people that work part-time as opposed to full-time and employees in non-management roles, tended to report more challenges, more than managers did, while senior executives reported the least. So, we thought that was interesting because what that means is that in practice senior executives might be at the risk of underestimating the scope of the mental health challenges within their organizations; because they're less likely to be dealing with it personally compared to their employee population.

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. So given those statistics, we talk a lot about suicide and we talk a lot about the things that are relative to that. What is the prevalence of thoughts of suicide amongst employees, related to some of those statistics you talked about?

Right. This was a very disturbing finding. So, in our survey, this was one of the issues that we looked at. We saw that more than 1 in 10 workers said they had thoughts of suicide either sometimes or often during the past year. In contrast, only three quarters said they had never had thoughts of suicide during the period we asked about.

And like everything else, it was worse for the younger generations. So, one quarter of Gen Z employees had thoughts of suicide sometimes or often and only about half of them said they never thought about it. So we're talking about people here who are feeling like they're in very desperate, very hopeless situations. And so, it's so important to make sure that they have access to the support and intervention they might need during those crisis moments.

And we know this is a growing problem, not just from LIMRA research, but from other research as well. If you look at government data, the rate of completed suicides has increased about 35% over the past two decades, and it's one of the leading causes of death in the U.S., especially among people at middle age or younger.

Yeah. That's startling, and it just continues to grow. So, as we think about suicide and we think about the other challenges that employees may face, we know that, like, disengagement and chronic illness, work related injuries, and just overall illness are costing the industry about $2.2 trillion a year. That's, like, 12% of our GDP. So, how do these mental health challenges impact employees and their perceptions of their employer and their job?

Right. That's a great question. So, we can't say that there's a causal relationship, but we definitely see a strong correlation where employees who are struggling with mental health issues tend to be less satisfied with their jobs and less satisfied with their employers. And we see that happen across a whole battery of different metrics on employment satisfaction that we've used.

So, in some cases, this might be a negative work environment that's contributing to the employee's stress and anxiety and so on. Well, I thought it was interesting that we also see a relationship where employees who are struggling with things like grief or family conflicts, so things that are not directly connected to the workplace, those employees are also saying that they're less happy at work. So some of this might actually be a matter of employees’ personal struggles and their general unhappiness coloring their feelings toward their workplace and toward their employer.

Another thing we saw was that employees struggling with mental health issues are less committed to staying with their current employers for the long term. So that's going to have a real impact on workplace turnover that employers need to be looking at.

Yeah. And we're seeing some of that retention issue show up post-pandemic where that continues to grow. So, as we look at the overall global spend or global impact, which is about 7.8%, how do these mental health challenges impact employees' perception of the benefits packages that their employers offer?

So, employees with mental health challenges are a lot less likely to be satisfied with their benefits. I'll give you some numbers here.

For employees that say they're struggling with mental health issues, 38% are satisfied with their benefits and that's compared to 57% who say they are not struggling.

We also see this interesting dynamic where employees with mental health challenges are less likely to feel like their employer is invested in their mental well-being.

So, you'd really hope to see that go the other way where, you know, you could imagine a scenario where employees are experiencing a mental health challenge of some sort. They go to their benefits package, they get help, and that helps them to be more aware of the support that's available to them versus the employees that have not struggled. You would hope that they would maybe even feel better about the support that they're getting at work, but that's not what's happening at all. The opposite is happening where they're less satisfied and they're less likely to feel supported.

But we do see that when employees have access to some type of dedicated mental health benefit, then they are more likely to feel like their employers are invested in their well-being. So offering benefits in this space does make a difference.

And we know that there's a lot of high demand for mental health benefits. Half of the employees in our survey told us that they're very or extremely interested in having their employers provide benefits or resources to help with mental health challenges, and only 11% told us that they're not interested at all.

And that's really interesting, especially when you talk to brokers and employers versus employees.

When we talk to our members, they're always, you know, cognizant of the fact they need to have an EIP and those types of things, but the utilization is really low. So, what mental health benefits are most desired by employees?

Yeah. So, the number one thing that they tell us they're looking for is actually paid time off to allow them to cope or to deal with stress or mental health issues. We think that a lot of them are thinking about the concept of mental health days when they said that, but it doesn't have to be. Depending on the issue that they're struggling with, disability insurance could be something that meets those needs under some circumstances.

The second and third top things that they told us they're looking for are actually very similar in practice. So, they're either looking for access to free or discounted therapy sessions or they want to have mental health visits covered by their health insurance without cost sharing. So, in either case, they're looking for more affordable access to be able to meet with mental health professionals for some sort of therapy or counseling depending on what their needs are.

After that, we also see a lot of interest in employee assistance programs, which we know often include some type of access to counseling services.

And number five was a lot of interest in services to help them find a therapist. We know it can be very challenging to find a therapist who's taking new clients at this time and especially challenging to find one that's in network. So, people are spending a lot of time on this, and they're having to wait a long time to get in to see someone when they want to.

One other thing I want to note, because we asked a whole laundry list of different, benefits that they might be interested in. Only 28% of employees told us that they were looking for education on mental or emotional health issues at the workplace.

So we know when employers are looking to beef up their benefits packages and bring in more benefits to address mental health, often the easiest thing for them to do is bring in educational offerings. And they say, oh, you know, we'll offer a webinar series. We'll do one on coping skills. We'll do one on mindfulness and so on. And it's certainly not that those are bad things to have. It's not like, you know, they won't get used, but it's important to keep in mind that this is not really the thing that employees are looking for the most. They're looking for access to actual counseling and services to help them.

Yeah, that's a great point Kim and we talk to employers and we talk to our members a lot about education, educating employees on what it means to have mental wellness or mental health in the workplace.

Mental illness is really a part of our corporate culture, and we talk to people a lot about spending the same amount on mental wellness as you do on innovation or anything else within the corporate culture. So, challenges of education awareness for employees to really understand their benefits is always a challenge. So how can we help them understand what's available to them and how it's covered and why it's covered?

Yeah. So, this is a challenge that we see across all of the different types of benefits that we research here at LIMRA. We see that employees often aren't aware of all the benefits that are available to them, and when they are aware, they don't understand those benefits very well.

So, in the case specifically of mental health benefits, we saw in our research that 13% of employees tell us they're not even sure whether their employer offers anything in this area or not and more than half of employees were what we would call uncertain. So, they say, I think so, I think they offer something or I don't think they offer something, but they can't answer the question with confidence.

So, this is a problem that the industry needs to address across the board. Employees can't use their benefits effectively if they don't know what they have. And, you know, there's a lot of things that we've seen that can help them. We know that communicating more frequently throughout the year is something that can be effective in increasing employees' understanding. We see that people have different preferences for how they want to receive benefits education. So, communicating through multiple channels is helpful because that makes it more likely that one of those channels will be something that the employee will actually engage with.

And we think making these improvements is particularly important in the case of mental health benefits, because then you're often talking about someone who's caught in a moment of crisis, who needs support right away and doesn't know where to go to get it. And of course, by their very nature, mental health challenges tend to reduce people's capacity to do the homework necessary to seek out those resources and figure out where they have to go and what they have to do to get the help that they need.

So, it's important for employers, who offer these benefits to make sure that they're communicating them to employees well and reminding employees about them on a periodic basis, not just once a year during open enrollment. We need to make sure people know what's available and know how to access it. And, you know, while we're on the subject, make sure those benefits are easy to access and don't take too many steps or a lot of hoops to jump through to get that support when it's needed. Because when the support is needed,  it's often harder to jump through those hoops than it would normally be.

Yeah. That's a really great point. Well, Kim, it's been great to talk to you today about this really important subject. I know we all understand about saving for the future. We save for our retirements. Mental wellness is the same thing. We need to treat our mental wellness today so that we have mental health in the future. And I think that it's really a critical subject, and it's all about developing awareness and resources for employees. So, thank you for joining us today on this very critical subject. For more information, please visit the LIMRA website at www.LIMRA.com under our BEAT survey. It's a great survey, and we'd love to share with you the additional statistics that Kim shared with us today. Have a great day, everyone.

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