A perfect storm: Ginger’s CEO shares what’s in store for employee mental health

“Are you ok?”

Many of us have asked our loved ones, friends and coworkers this question over the past 18 months as we’ve dealt with the trauma and fear of the COVID-19 crisis. As mental health plummeted from bad to worse, the majority of Americans grappled with record levels of stress, anxiety and depression.

Since the start of the pandemic, there has been a 93% increase in people seeking treatment for depression and a 63% increase for those seeking help for anxiety, according to Mental Health America. Stress and burnout continue to rise, with more than three-quarters of the workforce reporting feelings of burnout, spurred by fears around office reopenings and uncertainty around what comes next for so many.

Read more: This company is making summer vacation mandatory

At the same time, there is increased optimism around an end to the pandemic. As states reopen and vaccination rates continue to creep up, many are embracing a return to the way things once were. But while it seems like the clouds have parted on a dark 2020, the hard work has only just begun, says Russell Glass, CEO of Ginger, an on-demand mental health care support platform.

“It’ll be a year ‘post-pandemic’ for the mental health issues to get back to the pre-pandemic baseline,” Glass predicts. “There's going to be a long tail of mental health issues as we come out of the pandemic because the reasons that lead to these mental health increases are still there.”

Ginger has been on the front lines of helping millions of people access mental health care through their platform, which provides text-based behavioral health coaching, virtual therapy and psychiatry sessions and other self-help training tools. By June 2021, the app saw a 355% increase in coaching users and a 410% increase in those accessing therapy and psychiatry services, compared to pre-COVID utilization rates, according to Ginger data.

Glass sat down with EBN to discuss the expected long-tail of mental health issues we’ll face post-pandemic, the future of mental health care and what employers can do now — and in the months ahead — to combat the stigma around mental health.

Read more: Mental health issues can no longer be taboo at work

There’s this two-sided feeling right now, of everyone being excited to return to normal and the reality that mental health is still declining and a lot of people are still struggling. What are some of the reasons for this?

The pandemic is a perfect storm of mental health — loneliness and social isolation leads to depression, which leads to anxiety around the uncertainty of when things are going to get back to normal. People are dealing with financial pressures if they or their partners have lost income. There’s also uncertainty about getting sick or a family member getting sick. Many people also lost family members.

Now it’s uncertainty about, “Am I going to have to start commuting again? Are my children going back to school in the fall? I’m vaccinated but my coworkers aren’t.” All of these things still exist and are shifting and morphing.

Are employers prepared for this?

We've been talking about this for a little while, and I think that our employers are pretty well prepared. The acceleration of adoption of virtual mental health solutions was staggering. The 10% of people who had tried one of these things prior to the pandemic went to, like, 60% almost overnight. For employers, traditional healthcare and in-person doctor visits may go back to pre-pandemic levels, but when it comes to mental health, it’ll just get higher because it’s the perfect condition to handle from a telehealth standpoint.

Why is telehealth a more beneficial treatment model than a more traditional approach?

In most cases, you don't need somebody to be physically there to get tremendous value. In fact, we see a lot of evidence that not having to get in a car and go to an office, from a stigma standpoint, actually leads to better mental health care because there's less stress and anxiety. We see people miss their appointments far less often. Ginger's average miss rate is less than 5%; in traditional healthcare it’s about 25% of appointments that get missed.

At Ginger, our adoption rates increased 350% during the pandemic. Forty percent of our population has clinical levels of anxiety and depression. You're just dealing with the vast majority of the population who has a need, and services like Ginger can be there for them in minutes, 24/7. They're connected with a behavioral health coach and can start a simple chat, but then we can navigate those members effectively to the right level of care.

Read more: How AI can ensure every employees’ mental health needs are met

What are some other ways employers should be investing in employee well-being as we head into a post-pandemic work world?

It's important to recognize that not everybody's going to be in the same place, and some people are going to have tremendous anxiety going back into a work setting. Some people are going to feel like they just can't do it. As much as possible, creating environments where you have some flexibility for at least a period of time will be important. Make sure you're listening to your employees. Make sure you're taking the time to survey them, understand what the employee needs are, and then build a plan based on those needs.

Despite the challenges and uncertainty still ahead, do you feel hopeful about the conversation around mental health and where we’re at?

I am optimistic. The less stigmatized this is, the more people can talk about it and get support early. The earlier you get support in your journey, right before it's clinical, before it's acute, the easier it is to resolve and self-manage your mental health. And that's the goal, right? The goal is ultimately, can we get society to the point where everybody understands the self care routines that work for mental health in the same way that everybody understands that exercise is important for physical health. I'm optimistic that we are heading in that direction as a society.

But, I have concerns because the mental health system is so fundamentally broken that just de-stigmatization and getting more people into the system isn’t going to go well. So there’s going to be a period of time, as more and more people access care, that wait times are going to be longer and resources are going to be hard to find. That’s why solutions like Ginger and others are going to be super important, and it’s important that benefits leaders are thinking about this and taking the time to understand what the needs are and then communicating that to employees. It’s not a “If you build it, they will come,” type of thing. You have to talk to employees about these resources, enforce that the company wants them to be used and reinforce that executives believe in it.