When we first met Jamila Amirali, the founder and CEO for GENEius RX, we knew we had discovered a gem – a cutting-edge company with the same passion and drive we have when it comes to mental health and the over-prescription of medication. At MB Group, we had long been observing a worrying trend in the group insurance stats. Employees are using little to none of their psychology coverage while the quantity of prescriptions for drugs used to treat mental illness steadily rises.

Searches related to mental health reached an all time high in 2021, and workplace burnout became a breakout search up over 5,000% compared to the prior time period. If you’re an employer, we hope 2022 is the year you take the initiative to act on the mental well-being of your staff.

Because public health services are underfunded and have long wait times, many people rely on their employer-based benefits or bear the personal cost of private services.

It is very common in group insurance to see a company’s benefits statistics reflect little to no employee claims to the Psychologist… and yet dozens of prescription drug claims relating to mental illness. This offers us a snapshot of the growing international crisis when it comes to over-prescribing drugs to treat mental illness. As front-row spectators, we asked: What is causing this and how can we help? We believe the flaw is in the design.

The success of leadership of any kind, business or otherwise, can be measured by the well-being of those who are being led. Under normal circumstances, mental health should be prioritized within workplaces as it’s proven to have such a big impact on individual productivity and collaboration with other team members. But now more than ever, with the cumulative impact of stress in life and work, and the fact that those two places are one and the same for many of us now, business leaders must make mental health a strategic priority.

Over the past seven years, we have had the privilege of aligning with clients and business leaders who place a major emphasis on enhancing the mental well-being of their workplace. When these types of paradigm shifts towards mental health take place at a leadership level, this permeates the entire organization; from more comprehensive mental health benefits offered to staff, to a corporate culture of transparency, acceptance and ultimately growth and resiliency. In short, we were inspired to launch a series of profiles on these companies which will highlight their philosophy towards mental health in the workplace, and how they integrate this into a strategic priority within their organization.

Our team recently came across an article by Dr. Bill Howatt and Louise Bradley about burnout. Burnout is a frequent topic of conversation with our clients – what is it, and how do we create a culture that prevents (or supports) its occurrence?

At MB Group, not only are we unapologetic advocates of mental health in the workplace, but we also have some diehard NBA fans on our team. That’s why, when we saw this article discussing the mental health challenges the league is experiencing, it caught our attention.

We are in a time where the lens of the discussion around mental illness is focused on fragmenting the stigma surrounding it.

As a nation, we have championed this discussion and progressed its significance immensely; #BellLetsTalk hashtags now span our country from coast-to-coast, a federally recognized psychological safety standard in the workplace has now been recognized, and in 2010, the Mental Health Commission of Canada was formed to tackle the ongoing issue of mental illness at a national level.

Yet despite such progress, we have a long way to go before we can truly say we understand the depth or the magnitude of the mental health crisis which sits before us.