We Do Not Have a Mental Health Awareness Problem

Most Mental Health Awareness Month posts focus on what’s broken. There is a lot to fix. There is an even bigger opportunity.

Mental health is no longer a side conversation. It is one of the clearest levers to improve outcomes, experience and cost at the same time. The data continues to point in the same direction. 82% of employees are at risk of burnout in 2026. More than half of U.S. workers say burnout is now the new normal. Only 13% of employees feel comfortable talking about mental health at work, and 1 in 3 say the support they receive is not enough. Globally, depression and anxiety lead to 12 billion lost working days every year.

At the same time, mental health has become one of the fastest growing cost drivers in employer health plans. Burnout and disengagement cost employers billions annually in lost productivity and turnover, and individuals are still more likely to go out of network for mental healthcare than physical care.

It is easy to look at this and see a challenge. But there is a clearer signal: the system was not designed for how mental health actually shows up at work.

If you are an employer leader, you have likely invested more in mental health over the last few years than ever before and still feel like outcomes have not changed enough. If you are a health plan, you are likely seeing rising utilization without a clear line to better outcomes or lower total cost of care. You are not alone.

The issue is not a lack of resources. It is how those resources are designed and delivered. Today, most mental health support is built as an add-on, spread across separate vendors, workflows and experiences. That model does not hold up under real conditions.

Mental health needs to be treated like infrastructure.

That means designing systems that work under pressure, not just in theory. It means embedding support into the flow of work and care, not isolating it in benefits portals. And it means measuring outcomes, not just access.

When mental health is designed well, employees engage earlier, care becomes easier to access and employers and health plans see improvements in retention, performance and total cost of care.

This is not just about awareness. It is about better system design. Solving this requires rethinking how we design, personalize and integrate mental health support.

If you are actively evaluating how to improve mental health outcomes while managing cost, we would be glad to share what we are seeing across employers and health plans. Connect with the NovaOne team.

Sources:  WHO, NAMI, CUNYSPH, Spill, High 5 Test, The Interview Guys, Taylor Benefits