Latest news with #KathyPike
Forbes
25-06-2025
- Health
- Forbes
Serious Mental Illness: The Power Of The Job
Dr. Kathy Pike is the CEO of One Mind and faculty member at Columbia University's Department of ... More Psychiatry. Over thirty years of working with persons with serious mental illness, she has come to see employment as central to building a fulfilling life. In the late 1970s, when I started in the workforce field, persons with serious mental illness (SMI)—severe depression, severe anxiety, bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia spectrum disorder—were not even on America's workforce agenda. If they were recognized at all, they were seen as in need of recovery, too damaged, unable to function in the mainstream economy. This would change in the next two decades, as understanding of mental illness increased and employment came to be identified as central to recovery and individual health. The development of the Individualized Placement and Supports (IPS) model in the 1990s for persons with SMI moved forward the process of employment in mainstream workplaces, setting out a form and protocols for individual placements. Today a new stage of workforce activity is emerging, seeking to go beyond individual placements. Major employers are being enlisted. The goal: develop new workplace structures to increase the hiring of individuals with SMI and increase their retention. At the center of these efforts is One Mind, the mental health non-profit and volunteer group, based in Napa, California, which has grown into one of America's main centers of applied research, teaching, mental health start-ups, and employment. Currently, One Mind is getting ready to pilot its largest employment initiative, One Mind Launchpad. Serious Mental Illness, Lived Experience, Employment One Mind Launchpad is headed by Brandon Staglin, himself a person living with schizophrenia spectrum disorder. This brain disorder--characterized by delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking—affects an estimated 2.8-3.2 million Americans. Staglin was a freshman at Dartmouth in 1990, when he had his first psychotic episode. He took time to recover, and but was able to return within 6 months and graduate with a degree in Engineering Sciences in 1994. He returned to California and was hired as an engineer with Space Systems/Loral, as part of a team designing spacecraft for commercial and government uses. After a few years he was accepted to the graduate program in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But before he could enroll, he suffered another psychotic episode that left him disoriented and unable to function. He would recover, through a program of cognitive training, and return to a job. In the meantime, his mother, Shari Staglin, and father, venture capitalist Garen Staglin, decided to address SMI on a broader basis. Garen recalls 'Brandon told me that we could either run away from severe mental illness or run toward it.' Over the past nearly three decades, One Mind has established a series of projects: One Mind-Accelerator to promote startups aimed at mental health treatments and diagnostics, One Mind Academy, funding translational research in brain science and mental health, One Mind Lived Experience, giving voice in program and policy development to persons with the lived experience of SMI, and One Mind at Work, the employment initiative to scale employment and retention of persons with SMI. One Mind at Work, established in 2017, started by identifying best practices for supporting workforce wellbeing and performance, and developing its Mental Health at Work Index, challenging companies to test and evaluate their practices. It assembled an employer advisory council, drawn from its membership of over 130 major companies--dues-paying members who committed to mental health inclusion . One Mind was able to draw on Garen Staglin's enviable contact list of CEOs, and on the emergence of mental health as a priority among business groups. As Garen notes, 'In reaching out, I soon found nearly all executives had some person close to them with SMI issues—a family member, friend, neighbor, and the issue of severe mental health and employment resonated with them.' Accenture, Bank of America, Capital Group and Mars, are some of the companies most actively involved. The Interplay of Serious Mental Illness and Workplace Culture The new project One Mind Launchpad will guide employers to provide support more directly to young workers with significant mental conditions, and seek to scale placement efforts. It is set to start a pilot phase in January 2026, and Brandon Staglin is currently interviewing companies from the employer advisory council to be among the pilot companies. The pilot will start with 3 companies. Each company will partner with One Mind to tailor a mental health strategy to its needs. All of the strategies, though, will combine elements that One Mind has come to see as needed for effective hiring, retention, and career growtjh : Participation at all levels of the company's workforce: A multi-year commitment by the company CEO and other C-suite executives, along with the training of supervisors, managers and co-workers. Involvement of One Mind's Lived Experience group: Training of executives and others by members of One Mind's group of persons with SMI who can detail their own experiences in the workplace, and lessons from these experiences. Supports individualized to each worker: 'If you've met one person with SMI, you've met one person with SMI', One Mind says in relation to the supports individualized to each worker (a similar saying is part of the neurodiversity community). Measurement of outcomes, open reporting, and tracking of participants for a period of years: Perhaps most importantly, a foundational principle of One Mind is that outcomes be measured and reported openly. Employment of participants will be tracked for at least a five year period. In January 2027, the project will enroll its first participants: 50 young persons with significant mental health conditions to be hired into companies, 50 incumbent workers with such conditions to successfully retain their jobs, and 25 incumbent workers promoted to higher level roles. Beginning in 2028, the project is expected to grow rapidly. The goal is for a total of 14.700 persons with SMI served through the first five years of the project, with further major expansion planned in the following 5 years. Serious Mental Illness: The Power of the Job Dr. Kathy Pike, the CEO of One Mind since 2023, has seen the power of the job, over her more than thirty years of research and practice with persons with SMI. Having a job, the structure and economic role, enables persons with SMI 'to manage their conditions, to live fulfilling lives, to be part of society as we all seek to be.' Dr. Pike notes that any employment effort needs to build on the lessons of the recent decades, and be thoughtfully implemented. Care needs to be taken to get a good job fit, one in which the worker is able to truly contribute to the company. The responsibilities of the company, managers and co-workers need to be recognized at each stage of program implementation. The employment team will draw on support networks outside the workplace—family members, friends, mental health professionals. Through the structure of the job, a person with SMI is often able to better address other conflicts in their lives that previously seemed overwhelming. Significant mental health conditions may not be 'cured', but they can be effectively managed. The Neurologist's Brother In his autobiography, On the Move, Oliver Sacks, one of the most influential neurologists of the past half century, discusses his brother Michael, who battled schizophrenia throughout his life. At an early age, Michael showed signs of high intellectual promise (in his youth Michael was able to recite Nicolas Nickleby and David Copperfield by memory), but at age fifteen began to show signs of schizophrenia and at age sixteen was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Through a family friend, Michael at seventeen was able to find employment as a delivery messenger, and it became a job he worked at for 35 years until his company went out of business. During the time he was employed, he was able to manage his schizophrenia. But after losing his job his isolation increased and his health declined, and he passed away a few years after. Sacks laments that he was not able to assist his brother with finding new employment, and what loss of employment meant for his brother. Finding, maintaining, and developing employment for persons with SMI often will be a challenging process—one that even Oliver Sacks could not successfully achieve for his brother. The extent to which One Mind Launchpad will succeed in the next five years remains to be determined. But its heightened engagement of employers ('all in'), supports within the workplace, and supports outside of the workplace, should command attention among workforce practitioners and scholars.
Technical.ly
17-06-2025
- Health
- Technical.ly
A majority of workplaces do not have a mental health strategy
The Covid-19 pandemic's disruptions of traditional office dynamics forced more companies to consider workers' well-being. The progress made since then still isn't enough, per a recent study. Boards of directors are not engaged in mental health strategies, and C-suite members don't model healthy behaviors, according to the annual report One Mind published this spring. The Napa, California-based nonprofit pulled data from 91 organizations' self-assessments, representing feedback from about 2.5 million workers at employers of all sizes and industries. Three out of four companies do not have a mental health strategy, per the index One Mind developed. That's the core struggle for most firms trying to improve mental health among workers, explained CEO Kathy Pike at a recent briefing for journalists hosted by the National Press Foundation. Only 60% of executives say they've established mental health as a priority. 'When you don't have a mental health strategy and you don't know what problem you're solving for,' Pike told journalists, 'it's very hard to know whether what you're doing matters.' Eighty-six percent of firms have at least one executive tasked with overseeing this strategy. But that's often a 'default' plan that Pike said can backfire on a company. 'That's the most expensive strategy because when you don't pay attention to mental health and well-being,' said Pike, who's also a psychology professor at Columbia University, 'the cost to your people and the cost to your organization are unknown risks to you and not calculated.' Pike outlined at the briefing more downsides to ad hoc policies, the need to give employees holistic resources and the necessity of data to substantiate it all. Collecting quality data is necessary for change When you don't have a mental health strategy and you don't know what problem you're solving for, it's very hard to know whether what you're doing matters. Kathy Pike One Mind focuses on collecting and analyzing data about employers' wellness practices, as well as helping organizations implement the best methods. Pike believes that other firms need to set similar priorities to get this data about themselves, lest they lose what mental health programs they do offer. 'If you don't have data to demonstrate that what you're doing matters … you're going to be at the front of the line for the chopping block,' Pike explained. She acknowledged the overall lack of data on workplace mental health, which puts many business leaders at a loss for where to start building their strategy. Data is important for tracking impact and guiding decisions, per Pike, especially because many workplace leaders get thrown into leading mental health programs with little to no clinical training. 'We want leadership to have data to guide their decisions,' she said, 'so that they spend their time … in ways that are going to have the greatest impact.' Moving beyond simply 'providing' Pike sees fostering wellness as divided into three aspects: provide, protect and promote. Historically, 'provide' is the sole component focused on in workplace mental health. That means providing guidance for treatment or information, per Pike. But there's a lot more to wellness strategy, she asserted. Employers need to protect their workers from potential harm or negative impacts stemming from their work. Promoting healthy habits is also key, through actions like offering flexible work times. Leaders struggle with modeling healthy habits, per the index. Just 41% of them say they set positive examples. But leaders are essential to fostering healthy working environments, Pike explained, through their role in such essential functions as structuring the workday and how communications about promotions or raises take place, for example. 'If you don't have leadership support, it's just not going to survive and have the real impact that you want,' she said. The top of the corporate hierarchy similarly struggles to embed workplace mental health into its governance. Boards are not involved in mental health strategy, per the index — just one in 10 boards surveyed have formally defined roles related to it. Leaders are overwhelmed by individual solutions Pike found that HR professionals specifically get inundated by products claiming to be the solution for their employees' mental health. But workplaces need systemic, not pinpointed, solutions, she said. Those solutions include normalizing difficult conversations about stress and resilience. Products or tech focused on single conditions or issues are not going to change the overall landscape, per Pike. 'If your workers were your garden, and the majority of your plants were wilting, you wouldn't pick one up and say, 'What's wrong with this plant?'' Pike said, adding: 'You would understand that there's something wrong with the conditions.'
