Good morning!
Finding a therapist these days is difficult. Before I started seeing my current counselor, I’d been on her waitlist for six months—and that doesn’t include the time and energy spent looking for the right therapist with appointments that fit my schedule.
My situation is not unique: Around 60% of therapists say they have no openings for new patients, and 72% with waitlists say the wait has only grown since the start of the pandemic, according to a 2022 survey from the American Psychological Association. As such, workers are turning to their employers for support: 77% of workers believe their employers have a responsibility to support their mental well-being.
While many employers have opted to provide related benefits like online counseling through platforms like BetterHelp, some, including AT&T, Delta Airlines, and Google, have started offering workers access to on-site therapists, my colleague Trey Williams reports.
Employees are certainly taking advantage of the service. Psychologist Connie Siciliano Avila is AT&T’s second-most booked person at the telecommunications giant’s health and wellness clinic in its Dallas headquarters. She sees roughly 75 employees per month, who typically only have to wait one day to get an appointment. Avila says the sessions are just the same as what a patient would receive in private practice, though she's "a little more mindful that somebody’s going to leave my office and go to work." Management doesn't have access to patient records, she stresses, nor does AT&T directly employ her, but rather, she's employed by its on-site benefits partner, Premise Health.
While having an on-site therapist is still uncommon at most companies, those that offer the benefit say it drives employee engagement and productivity and strengthens talent attraction and retention.
“The progress we’ve made on mental health in the last decade has felt like—finally,” says Katherine Morgan Schafler, a former on-site therapist at Google. “It’s about building as many bridges to mental health resources as possible.”
Read Trey’s full article here.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
