The mental health gap: why the model is failing your employees

The U.S. is spending more on mental health care than ever before. More people are in treatment than at any point in history. And yet depression and anxiety rates remain higher than they were before the pandemic.

More spending. More access. Worse outcomes. That is not a funding problem. It is a structural one.

Most employer mental health benefits were built around a single unit of care: the scheduled therapy session. That model was never designed for how mental health problems actually show up. It cannot reach the employees who need it most, and the cost of that does not disappear. It moves to a different line item in your claims.

This report explains why the current model fails, what it is costing your organization, and what the evidence says a different model looks like.

Key learnings

• Understand why 940 out of 1,000 employees with access to a mental health benefit will not use it this year, and why awareness campaigns cannot fix that
• Learn the four structural failures built into the session-based model that no EAP redesign or awareness campaign can resolve
• See how untreated mental health shows up in your claims, and what $1,380 in annual medical cost reduction per treated member means for your benefits strategy
• Explore the five criteria that define what an effective mental health model actually looks like, grounded in clinical evidence
• Discover what independently validated up to 3.2x ROI looks like in practice, and how to make the financial case to your CFO

Get the clinical evidence and financial framework your team needs to understand the mental health gap and make a defensible case for closing it.