Big Health’s Panel Discussion with Delta Air Lines at The Conference Board, Resilience at Work 2018 in Boston

At The Conference Board, Resilience at Work 2018 in Boston MA, Big Health held a panel discussion with clinical experts and Delta Air Lines on resilience and mental health in the workplace.

The Discussion

Resilience and Mental Health: Building the Armor of Those Most in Need

The Panel

• Dickon Waterfield, Chief Commercial Officer, Big Health
• Dr Jenna Carl, Medical Director, Big Health
• Dr Michael Otto, Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Boston
• Jae Kullar, RDN, PMP, Manager Health and Wellbeing, Delta Air Lines  

The Session

Resilience helps us adapt to adversity and bounce back when trauma strikes, but what happens when people don’t manage to adapt or bounce back? Those people may be suffering from a mental health condition: common conditions like anxiety, insomnia, and depression affect 1 in 5 employees. These individuals are the most in need of psychological help but basic resilience training is generally not enough. During the session experts explored what it takes to build back the armor of those who are suffering most and Delta Air lines demonstrated how they’ve started providing more in-depth help for mental health in their populations.

Here are our key takeaways from the session

• Resilience is useful at different time points, especially before the onset of  a clinical condition such as depression or anxiety or after remission to prevent relapse. However, resilience is not sufficient for those currently suffering from a mental health condition, which is 1 in every 5 people or 20% of the population
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)  is a focused, collaborative, here and now, skill-development therapy which involves learnt techniques to help modify unhelpful behaviors and thoughts. The limitation with in person CBT is frequent enough access to drive real change and adherence
• Digitized CBT addresses the limitations with CBT such as access, cost and time and makes it accessible for everyone by providing evidence based care through the same medium that people communicate every day, their smartphones
• Across anxiety and mood disorders, CBT offers equal short term outcomes to medications but offers stronger relapse prevention, even with short term treatment. Due to relapse prevention, people can then learn to do things differently, using the techniques taught to them by CBT and keep doing it, this is the resilience aspect of CBT