How COVID- 19 has impacted mental health spending
There’s no way around it—2020 has been a stressful year. Between increased health anxieties over the global coronavirus pandemic, adjusting to shelter-in-place orders, transitioning to work-from-home and learning to navigate remote learning while schools are shut down, major civil rights protests, and an uncertain economic future, it’s no wonder that Americans’ mental health is suffering.
Elinore McCance-Katz, the assistant secretary for mental health and substance abuse at the Department of Health and Human Services, stated that, “We’re quite concerned with what we’re learning from the field, what’s going on in communities that have been under stay-at-home orders. There are situations in which people have lost employment. They’ve lost their jobs, the structure to their lives. This puts them in a position where they have a lot of time on their hands, stress, anxiety, and boredom.”
Health experts and social workers across the country worry about how Covid-19 disruptions will impact risk factors for deaths of despair, including increased anxiety, unemployment, and lack of community connections amid social distancing guidelines.
It is a well-known fact that satisfied and happy workers provide better customer service and are more productive each day, leading to a 12% spike in productivity for your business and higher profits, according to a recent study at the University of Warwick. According to Shawn Anchor, author of The Happiness Advantage, the brain works more effectively when a person is feeling positive and is more creative, adopting better problem solving skills with this positive mindset. In this blog post, we’ll discuss how the mental health industry has responded to coronavirus disruptions by shifting from in-person visits to offering broader telehealth and telemedicine services. We’ll also give you some tips for how you can best support your employees’ mental health through difficult times.
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