Why employers like Lululemon and CVS offer mental health first-aid training to employees

Burnout. Depression. Loneliness. Anxiety. Americans are feeling the weight of the world on their shoulders, and their mental health is suffering.

At least one in five Americans deal with some type of mental illness in any given year, and there was a record number of deaths by suicide in 2022.

As the mental health crisis continues to worsen and work environments continue to impact employee mental health, more companies, including CVS, Lululemon, and Cardinal Health, are offering mental health education and training to employees to help their colleagues in distress.

Modern first aid. Since 1910, US law has stipulated that employers must have basic medical supplies in the workplace. And for decades, employers have offered certifications and training to prepare employees to help in the case of a colleague’s medical emergency, before EMS or other trained professionals arrive.

Now, employers are increasingly offering mental health first-aid training, Tramaine EL-Amin, VP of mental health first aid USA at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, which offers various mental health first aid training courses, told HR Brew. It’s somewhat similar to traditional first-aid training, but instead of training employees to help when there’s an emergency with the body, workers are trained to spot when a colleague may have a mental health crisis. The program, which can take as little as eight hours to complete, has 25,000 instructors across the US, and has trained more than three million people in mental health first-aid.

“Just like you would for CPR first aid, if we see an accident, and we’re not an EMT, we’re not going to jump out and try to provide care at the level that an EMT would…We would provide that care at the level that we were trained to do,” she explained, adding that “there’s that peer-support element that mental health first-aid brings.” Employees are trained how to identify and respond to a coworker experiencing a mental health event.

Observations and empathy are key. Mental health first-aid can help reduce the stigma around mental illness, EL-Amin said. “It helps them recognize and help a colleague who might be experiencing a mental health or substance use challenge, but do so in ways that stay in their lane.”

CVS, for example, trains its employees to notice changes in their colleagues’ behavior, whether it’s a shift in appearance or in how they communicate, Cara McNulty, president of behavior health and mental well-being at CVS, said. “We need people to care about each other as humans,” she said, and mental health first-aid can provide a framework to do so.

Cardinal Health started offering its around 48,000 employees mental health first-aid certification during the pandemic to equip “participants with the skills to reach out and provide initial help and support someone who may be developing a mental health or substance abuse issue or a challenge that could lead to a mental health crisis,” Ola Snow, Cardinal Health’s CHRO, told HR Brew in June.

And according to a report from the National Institutes of Health, mental health first-aid training can help improve knowledge about and attitudes towards mental wellness.

“It’s really about providing tools for everyone…to be able to be more equipped in dealing with conversations around mental well-being and mental health,” Susan Gelinas, SVP of people and culture at Lululemon, said of the company’s first aid training program. “Then also to know all of the resources available, and to be able to direct towards those resources to best support people.”

A more focused future. EL-Amin believes the next wave of mental health for employees will be more targeted and specific to the worker’s industry or role, like a manufacturing plant manager. “We’ve tailored our content to allow an enterprise approach, but also an industry-specific approach,” she said, noting that the National Council for Mental Wellbeing recently released content specifically for HR leaders.

Mental health training can shift the culture of an organization, and allow everyone to have a support role, in EL-Amin’s opinion. “HR leaders don’t have to be the only place where training and education and support and well-being are,” she said. Mental health first-aid can remind “HR professionals that they have the ability to tag others into the ring to make this a joint effort across their organization, and that they don’t have to carry that burden of shifting the entire culture themselves.”