Corporate Mental Health Benefits

Abstract

Public understanding and professional treatment of mental illness has a history of which we can only be embarrassed. For reasons steeped in myth, fear, confusion, and ignorance, illness of the mind has frequently been viewed as a category of disease separate from that affecting any other part of the human body. It is all right to break an arm, have a kidney fail, succumb courageously to cancer, or use the ears and nose to support a strange apparatus designed to assist our eyes. But the mind, that is different. That we were all supposed to totally control—by ourselves. And, if something should be a bit abnormal, therapy often entails more ostracism than rehabilitation. With such a history, it is little wonder that the evolution of employee health benefits offered coverage for nearly every other human organ and disease before including the mind and its problems.

This paper and the survey upon which it is based were prepared with the appreciated assistance of Saul Kilstein and Andy Weinberg…and seventy-nine corporate leaders.