Mental Health @ Workplace

Supporting employers in managing employees who have mental health issues

Our solution is the first-stop-shop to the employers who want to support their employees who have mental health issues.

Mental health has become one the biggest health challenges of the 21st century. According to the World Health Organization there are more than 400 million people globally suffering from mental disorders. In 2017 a study of high-performing organizations revealed that 1 in 4 suffer from burnout leading to depression.

Depression, anxiety, bipolar or sleep disorders deplete energy of employees and reduce their performance at work. In more severe instances of psychotic, personality or substance abuse disorders it may become nearly impossible to function at work.

In those circumstances the employer faces a difficult choice. Worsening work performance might just trigger firing the employee. However, a more responsible and sustainable choice would be to learn how to be supportive towards the employee, help them address and cure their mental health condition and win them back to the organization and to society.

Our solution helps the employers in several ways. 

1. Mediates the contacts with experience advisors and mental health professionals to provide the first point of assistance on how to address mental health issues;
2. Provides introductory training to employers to increase their awareness on how to respond to critical mental health incidents.
3. Provides blueprints on creating psychologically safe environment at work, to reduce stress, accommodate for special needs associated with mental disabilities.

The solution will change the World by helping the individuals who have mental health challenges to remain at or return to workplace. It will support the employers by making them more aware of how to engage people who have mental health issues. It will also attempt to reduce the stigma around mental disorders.

It is the first platform of its kind that focuses on the needs of the employer and brings together employers, employees, mental health experts (e.g. psychologists, psychiatrists, mental health occupational therapists), experience advisors (e.g. employers and employees who have had experiences of managing mental health issues) and specialists in particular fields (e.g. labor lawyers, public health researchers, mental health faculty members, representatives of universities, mental health hospitals and rehab centers).

The platform is built on a cloud-based service, focused on its main customer - the employer who wants to help its employees who have mental health issues. The platform is customized for each target group who provide their services to the clients.

The aim is to pilot the prototype during the next with a group at least 100 diverse organizations from a range of different countries who already have an experience of employing people with mental health challenges. We first plan to start our work in the North-Eastern part of Europe where we are located. However, as we plan to scale the service globally shortly thereafter we design the service to assist the global market needs.

We intend to address mental health issues at work all around the world.

Our solution is accessible through our website in multiple languages.

It is currently in a phase of a prototyping and it has just been tested with a sample of stakeholders. Nobody has yet bought the solution.

Within the next 12 months we plan to start serving at least 100 clients. In 3 years we intend to be globally accessible and to assist at least 10000 clients.

Our team has had first hand experience in handling employee mental health issues.

• Ms. Kersti Peenema - M.Sc. in Interactive Media and HR experience - project management and leadership skills to build the network of mental health specialists and service providers, experience advisors, and mental health researchers;
• Ms. Mari Sepp - MA in Administration - project management and sales knowledge with network of our potential clients employers;
• Ms. Kadri Tammae - M.Sc. in Computer Science - IT development and project management skills;
• Mr. Marko Rillo - Ph.D. in Innovation and Strategy. Clinical research knowledge and skills for scaling the model globally.

The employers who will use the services, will pay for the use of the services:

• Basic introductory advisory service in case of first encountering mental health issues at work,
• Online training and support package on handling mental health issues at work,
• Platform for mediating advisory services of mental health support specialists and experience advisors.

We feel that MIT Solve "Frontlines of Health" shares our mission to tackle complex challenges in making affordable and effective health care solutions available for everybody.

We intend to scale globally. We cannot handle this objective alone. So far, we have worked on mental health issues at work in North-Eastern European context. We were privileged to prototype our solution with different mentors at Garage48 startup hub. We hope that MIT Solve mentors and peers will help to pilot our services in the North America and learn about the different tools to make our service globally usable

There are a few barriers for building the global solution for mental health issues at work:

• Mental health issues at work are perceived at different cultures differently. At Solve we can raise the awareness about this topic globally and also gather information on how to bring the solution to as many markets as possible.
• At different countries, the approaches taken by the Government and NGOs to solving mental health issues are different. We hope to gather knowledge on different solutions and come up with best practices that could be scaled globally.