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Joe Hornyak
Former editor of Benefits and Pensions Monitor and founder of Joe Hornyak Communications
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Social isolation started before pandemic
While the COVID pandemic created isolation drove an exponential increase in the number of Canadian workers suffering from mental health issues, it merely accelerated a trend that was already underway, says Paula Allen, TELUS Health global leader, research and client insights. “We were trending to more isolated societies for several years before the pandemic hit. It just really kind of brought it home.
The growing isolation is due in part to technology which has reduced person-to-person contact and relationships even among family and friends, let alone in the workplace. For those who have relationships, the quality of those relationships, particularly in the younger generation, isn't as strong it was. “You really do have to have connection when you share experiences with others. You don't really have a shared experience if you're communicating in a text sort of way. So this is this is a societal issue and it's just how we've been trending,” said Allen.
And it is known that a sense of connection and support is a buffer to stress. “It helps us deal with day-to-day stressors, the ups and downs.”
Without that social support, “we ended up becoming much more vulnerable without social support and many have not gone back to having that social contact.” This is “not really surprising when you think of the disruption that we went through with COVID ? the isolation, uncertainty, risk, and polarization. These are things that the human mind does not like so we really saw a shift in our mental health.”
As a result, some people who were a little bit vulnerable shifted into the high risk group which she estimates is “perhaps one third of the working population.”
But even if people didn't move into a high risk situation or have a diagnosis of that sort, “we've just become more sensitive to stress. You see it everywhere. It’s like people are on edge and it is showing up in how they're speaking to each other. There’s more anger, more cynicism,” she said.
“Some academics call it a collective trauma,” she said, “and even after we went through this and the trauma that initiated it is gone, the impact isn’t. So there's work that needs to be done to take away the impact. To emphasize the impact of isolation, she likened it to being in solitary confinement in prison which has been identified as cruel and unusual punishment. “It's almost impossible not to have a significant mental health impact,” she said.
Going forward, she said it's about awareness and being intentional. “Our society is moving to a place where it's providing everything that we need to keep mentally healthy, so we have to be intentional and seek it,” she said.
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One example is exercise.
Workers in Canada see a correlation between employer support of physical health and positive mental health. However, only 13 per cent of workers say they exercise to improve or maintain their mental health, says a report on physical activity and mental health from TELUS. For the rest, a lack of motivation, energy, time, and finances are cited as barriers to exercising regularly. Its ‘Mental Health Index’ score is 46.2 for workers who say their employer is not helpful in managing their physical health. This is more than 18 points below the national average of 64.6.
“Technology, cars, and machines have brought us to a point where we're more sedentary because we don't need to do physical labour as much anymore. So we have to be intentional to get exercise and to have movement in order to keep healthy,” she said.
When employers see signs of strain and stress, there are two areas where workplaces can help.
One is services ? helping to make sure that people have support and making sure that it is communicated, it's high quality, and it encourages people to be proactive and not just accept this shift in mental health.
The other is the environment. “We know that there's two parts of mental health and in our data we saw that in organizations that were really intentional in terms of very visibly supporting mental health by training managers and making sure that they're paying attention to mental health culture, which kind of speaks to the Canada’s national psychological health and safety standard, people did better,” she said. “Employers have influence. It's to their benefit to make sure that they're doing what they can to support people's mental health and wellbeing because it not only helps the individual in society, it actually helps them work productively. We see a correlation with things like innovation, creativity, and good customer service in workplaces providing this support.
“We’re at a place in our society where we are taking the best approach to making sure that there are supports available and removing the stigma to help people deal with mental health issues that may be societal in nature.”
For details on these stories, visit www.bpmmagazine.com