Beyond Mental Health Month: Supporting Mental Health Across a Career
May is Mental Health Month, and many companies are sharing information to amplify the need for increased mental health awareness, stigma reduction, and access to resources. There are also ongoing conversations around why we need to move beyond awareness months to focus on year-round strategic change and education in organizations. But I have been thinking about a third piece to the mental health awareness conversation — what if we move beyond months, and even year-round strategies, toward focusing on mental health across a career?
When it comes to mental health, I’m a pro. Living with bipolar, anxiety, and anorexia, I must maintain diligent focus on how my mental health impacts my life and work. As I developed awareness of my health needs, matured, and increased career responsibilities, I began to see that our relationship to work is tightly woven to our wellness and sense of self.
This Mental Health Month, while discussing year-round strategic support, let’s dig a little deeper. It’s time we move toward a third conversation, the critical intersection between organizational responsibility and an individual’s journey to support mental health across a career.
The Organizational Imperative
By now, many of us know the ethical and business case for supporting workplace mental health and acknowledge that this work saves money by cutting down absenteeism, increasing retention, and decreasing usage of health benefits.
Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) 2025 Workplace Mental Health Poll, while 77% of respondents shared that they feel comfortable if a coworker talked to them about their mental health, half of the employees say they worry they would be judged for sharing their mental health struggles. We desperately need strategic organizational action and design to get us to a place where mental health at work is fully supported and normalized.
The Individual Journey – Evolving Needs Across Career Stages
With almost two decades working as a mental health advocate, I see the continued importance of using a dedicated time point, such as an awareness month or celebratory day, to amplify a message and start a conversation. There is also ample evidence that we must create ongoing strategic mental health support within the workplace.
While these strategies get us closer to a place where mental health at work is fully supported and normalized, we need to focus on the individual’s mental health journey in conjunction with their ability to empower organizational change for mental health.
Like health needs changing as we age, mental health needs evolve throughout our careers. As we mature intellectually and our roles and responsibilities change, we must create more strategic support and empowerment.
Early career
I graduated from college in the wake of a recession. With heightened anxiety, I was lucky to get a job in research while beginning my career as a mental health advocate. This job allowed me the time to complete and publish a memoir with my mom, further growing my advocacy pursuits. As an advocate, I got to do cool things like travel around the country speaking at events and even intern at the WHO in Switzerland.
But while my drive to fight stigma was ablaze, the heightened sense of urgency coupled with ambition for career growth meant my health couldn’t keep up. At this point, I didn’t know I could bring my advocacy into the workplace. Initially, I was delighted just to see a mental health benefits flyer in a breakroom or mental health awareness emails sent out in May. At this point in my career, emotional maturity, and health journey, I would have significantly benefited from a holistic organizational mental health strategy.
In addition to the regular stressors of beginning a new career and starting a new job, many early career professionals today were finishing high school or college impacted by a pandemic. There are also heightened concerns regarding job seeking and job security due to the economy, AI, and world politics. In addition, many mental illnesses show their first symptoms around this time. According to NAMI, 15% of employees ages 18-29 rated their mental health as “somewhat poor” and entry-level employees are less likely to say their mental health is “very good.”
Starting my career, I wish I had some of today’s more common resources like employee resource groups (ERGs), normalization of mental health conversations, and dedicated mental health benefits. However, where I would have really thrived was empowering my advocacy passion to help drive mental health conversations forward internally.
Mid-career
In my mid-career, I worked in a range of spaces such as the Americans with Disabilities Act National Network, organizational change management, and as a communications director in the performing arts. I gained leadership skills and expertise and began to lead my own teams.
As an advocate, I gained enough leadership and autonomy to push for change externally and internally. By the time I started to see companies hiring advocates and public speakers, I had already been presenting at mental health conferences and events for years. And yet, I was shocked and delighted that large organizations like Starbucks and Accenture wanted me to share my personal story with their employees. The world of work was not a space I had ever expected to discuss such sensitive issues. As my responsibilities grew, I soon paused much of my external advocacy, instead, bringing it into the companies where I worked. However, as a leader, I could not do it all and began worrying not just about my own mental health, but that of my team and organization.
As we approach mid-career, many of us experience higher responsibilities, whether as a manager who must act as a mediator between our team and leadership, or as an individual contributor juggling multiple roles and large workloads. Many individuals in this space feel they can’t seek mental health support from those below or above. There can be increased feelings of isolation, heightened stress, and a higher risk of burnout. A new study shows that “66% of American employees are experiencing some sort of burnout in 2025” with younger generations facing significantly higher rates, with 81% of 18- to 24-year-olds and 83% of 25- to 34-year-olds.
Late Career
For some, late career comes with increased leadership responsibilities, some within the C-Suite or on boards. For others, the ability to start winding down your career means you may want to become an individual contributor without the added work or pressure of managing a team. Late career holds its own stress and isolation, while discussions about retirement can create fear of what comes next. Today, workers also struggle with rapidly changing technology, deciding whether they can retire during turbulent financial times, and navigating shifting workforces that may lead to late career job or role changes.
When contributing to the larger mental health conversation, those with longer work experience bring important perspectives. While younger generations may be more used to speaking openly about mental health, late career professionals may know how to address stigma in a different way to reach those unwilling or unable to take part in such vulnerable conversations.
Practical Actions for Lasting Impact
There are many ways we can support mental health at work. We can utilize communications to build awareness, focus on organizational strategy, focus on individual needs, and empower individuals to contribute to change. Ideally, we do all of the above.
Here are some things you can incorporate in your organization for lasting impact:
- Use Mental Health Month as a jumping-off point for starting new conversations or reviving old ones. Create an awareness campaign normalizing mental health or sharing mental health resources. Use this time to amplify the voice of lived experience through storytelling, public speakers, or media. While it can be powerful for companies to show support for mental health through external media, make sure you are doing so in a meaningful and authentic way with the input of those with lived experience.
- Once conversations have begun, weave mental health support into everything. Make it part of your strategy beyond benefits. Include mental health in work design, culture, engagement, communication, training, and more. This is a great time to implement One Mind’s “3 Ps” Framework:
- Protect: Protect mental health by eliminating psychosocial hazards and minimizing risks that can negatively affect workers.
- Promote: Promote psychological wellbeing by developing the positive aspects of work as well as worker strengths and positive capacities
- Provide: Provide access to information, resources, and services that enable corrective organizational actions to address workforce mental health needs regardless of their cause.
- Pay attention to individuals’ specific mental health needs based on generation and career level. While everyone sees and experiences the world differently, there are commonalities among specific groups that need individualized support and interventions. Work with these small groups for feedback on their unique needs. Create communication channels for them to share what matters most and how you can support their mental health journey.
- Empower your team members to become change agents at every level through training, strategic initiatives, committees, and workgroups. Learn how to empower individuals by looking at One Mind’s newest report.
A Lifelong Journey
Today, I have entered a new space in my career. I understand my mental health needs as a worker and how I am best able to create the change I want to see. After a decade of dreaming of full-time advocacy work, I have finally taken the plunge and built my own mental health consulting company where I support change as an external team member, one able to see things from a new perspective and deep lived insight.
Writing as a Lived Experience Council member for One Mind feels profoundly meaningful, having first worked with them as a young advocate, newly diagnosed with bipolar, to my career today as a business owner, almost sixteen years later. They have seen me grow as an employee, navigating my mental health needs across career stages and industries, and have watched me leap into my entrepreneurial work, guiding companies through their own mental health journeys.
I have yet to meet someone who is unsupportive of workplace mental health. Many people may just not be aware of how to contribute. Whether as an organization, individual contributor, senior leader, or board member, everyone can play a role. By broadening our approach beyond Mental Health Month and organizational strategy to encompass the entire human experience throughout one’s career, we can empower everyone to drive change through the power of their own stories.
Workplace mental health is not a one-month, one-size-fits-all conversation. It’s a lifelong journey. Let’s work together to build systems that grow with us.