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 EAPA wishes its members, partners and EA professionals everywhere a very happy holiday season. As we reflect on the past year, here (in reverse chronological order,) are the 10 most popular NewsBrief articles of 2015. Our regular publication will resume Tuesday, Jan. 5.
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Fortune
From Nov. 3: Recently, director of the National Institute of Mental Health Thomas Insel announced his departure from public service — and his move to Google Life Sciences. He stated that the mental health world is "seeing an explosion of interest on the device side," and that "many technology companies think mental health is the next frontier."
Those are powerful words, rife with promise and opportunity. But Insel's comments beg the question: If there is so much interest, why aren't there many mental health apps?
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Harvard Business Review
From Sept. 8: Over the course of a typical workday, negative and positive things inevitably happen to you. If you're like most people, you tend to focus mainly, or even exclusively, on negative experiences. They're what you ruminate over, what you talk to your friend about as you're driving home, what you discuss with your partner at night. It sometimes feels good to talk about the negatives — it feels therapeutic. What most people don't realize is that positive experiences — even small ones — provide you with valuable resources that can be used to reduce stress, including physical symptoms such as headaches or muscle tension. They make it easier for you to detach yourself from work at the end of the day.
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Psych Central
From Dec. 1: Scholars at the University of Cambridge have discovered that many of the market-leading commercial counseling programs lack evidence of effectiveness. Moreover, two-thirds of studies on "psychosocial" treatments fail to declare conflicts of interest.
Researchers explain that use of the commercial counseling programs is growing rapidly as health services in many countries increasingly rely on prescribed "psychosocial interventions."
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BenefitsPro
From April 28: Nearly 80 percent of employers offer programs to promote the physical well-being of their employees. They may want to expand wellness programs to address depression and other mental health issues, based on a disturbing trend documented in a recent study by the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
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Lexology
From June 9: According to a recent study by the Center for Disease Control, employers in the U.S. lost approximately $77 billion in 2010 due to the impaired productivity of hungover employees. The figure is $90 billion if you include absenteeism due to hangovers, and it balloons to $249 billion if you add in the additional costs of health care, car crashes, and deaths. Here's what employers should know about dealing with the costly problems posed by hungover employees:
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Yahoo News
From June 9: Last year, United States workers peed into one drug testing company's cups about 9.1 million times. And last year, as in other recent years, analysis of about 350,000 of those cups indicated drug use. Most often, the drug of choice was marijuana, followed by amphetamines and painkillers.
The data are a little patchy, but the best estimate is that about 40 percent of U.S. workers are currently subjected to drug tests during the hiring process. Intuitively, that seems like a good idea: A sober, addiction-free workforce is probably a more productive workforce and, in the cases of operating forklifts or driving 18-wheelers, a safer workforce too.
But some of this cup-peeing might be for naught.
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Business Management Daily
From Sept. 15: Most employers outsource employee assistance plans, which offer confidential counseling to help workers deal with personal problems, work-related stress and other concerns. But some organizations handle EAP services in-house.
That can cause a potential conflict of interest if an EAP counselor's advice creates liability for the employer or calls into question its actions.
In the following case, an EAP counselor suggested that an employee who alleged he was being harassed might have a legal case against the employer. As the court pointed out, punishing the counselor only served to multiply the employer’s legal risk.
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Psych Central
From July 28: Results of Contracts for Safety, where a client is asked to agree either verbally or in writing that she will not engage in self harm, were first published by Drye, et.al. in 1973. Although these original authors only investigated its effectiveness with patients in a long-term relationship with their therapist, the use of the tool has since become standard practice for many crisis teams and clinicians, even during an initial interview. But are they effective?
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Office of National Drug Control Policy
From Sept. 15: SAMHSA issued the 2014 NSDUH report on mental and substance use disorders as part of the kick off for the 26th annual observance of National Recovery Month. With regard to substance use, the report found some areas of progress, particularly among adolescents. Substance use levels in many areas, however have remained relatively constant. For example, the percentage of adolescents aged 12 to 17 who were current (past month) tobacco users declined by roughly half from 15.2 percent in 2002 to 7.0 percent in 2014. But overall, the use of illicit drugs — including marijuana — among Americans aged 12 and older increased from 9.4 percent in 2013 to 10.2 percent in 2014. This was driven particularly by the increase in adult marijuana use.
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The Guardian
From Sept. 1: Vester Flanagan, the gunman who killed two journalists in Virginia, was told by his bosses to go to his EAP after colleagues at the television station where he worked repeatedly complained about him. "This is a mandatory referral requiring your compliance," his then supervisor, Dan Dennison told Flanagan on 30 July 2012. "Failure to comply will result in termination of employment."
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