Want Better Mental Health Outcomes in the Workplace? Start with Inclusive Care Options

An inclusion-focused approach to workplace mental health benefits not only creates more equitable outcomes for LGBTQIA+ workers but also leads to a healthier and more productive workplace for all, according to Lyra Health’s Evelyn Farias.

“Everything is better across the board,” she told attendees of the session “Nurturing Inclusivity: Cultivating Inclusion and Belonging in the Workplace” during the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2024 (SHRM24) last month. “More people get care, more people stay in care, the clinical impact of that care is higher, and the investment that you’re making in those benefits—and those are huge investments—are more effective.”

Farias serves as a DEIB Program Specialist, Workforce Transformation, for Lyra Health and led the session alongside Alethea Varra, Senior Vice President, Clinical Care, at the Burlingame, Calif.-based workforce mental health benefits provider. Together they explored the mental health stressors that members of the LGBTQIA+ community face and the ways in which HR leaders can adapt their organizations’ mental health benefits to better support all their workers.

LGBTQIA+ people are more likely to experience a chronic mental health condition, noted Varra. “We know that individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community have almost twice the rates of struggling with a mental health disorder, and those who are part of the trans community are almost four times the rates of struggling with some of those same challenges,” compared with people who are not part of those communities, she said. Common conditions for these communities include anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, and suicidality. These higher rates don’t stem from anything inherent to LGBTQIA+ people but are instead due to systemic societal issues and unique stressors, she added. 

At the same time, these workers may face barriers to mental health care, including stigma or discrimination and a lack of clinicians who understand their experiences. Varra and Farias said workplaces can help address these issues by making sure their mental health benefits include a focus on culturally responsive care, a clinical approach that considers clients’ unique backgrounds, identities, and experiences.

Farias noted that when mental health professionals practice culturally responsive care, it makes the patient feel less isolated, reduces misunderstandings, and relieves them of the burden of having to explain some aspects of their lives. Culturally responsive care is accessible to a larger population, increases the likelihood that workers will seek out and complete treatment, and leads to better treatment outcomes, she and Varra said.

But those benefits aren’t unique to any one group. Early in the presentation, Farias asked audience members to raise their hands if they were members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and she observed that few people raised their hands. Later, she asked the audience to raise their hands if the barriers to care she described seemed relatable to them and noted that many more hands shot up.

That overlap suggests that the issues LGBTQIA+ people face are broadly relatable, and by focusing on inclusive mental health benefits, workplaces can improve outcomes for all members of a diverse workforce, said Varra.

“I want to use this [session] as an opportunity to build a bridge for connection and empathy, so that we can find commonalities in these experiences and use them to fuel our advocacy efforts in support of one another through a more intersectional lens,” Varra said.

The pair recommended HR leaders make the following adjustments to their organizations’ mental health benefits to better serve the mental health needs of all their workers:

• Recruit providers who are experienced in culturally responsive care.
• Assess your organization’s diversity and then ensure members have access to providers from a variety of identities.
• Introduce organizational programs, such as workshops and training, that address mental health issues in the workforce beyond individual care.

When workplaces invest in high-quality care, it can yield significant benefits for the organization, Farias said, because it relieves workers of the mental burdens that keep them from doing their best work. “You can’t meet your goals if employees are burned out, if they’re quitting, if they’re quiet quitting,” she warned. “They have these mental stressors that they’re not going to check at the door, and those are going to impact how engaged they are.”