A lot of workers are really tired of the word ‘resilience’’

In Canada, public safety personnel (PSP) are experiencing high rates of psychological injuries — and employer-provided mental health programs are doing little to help them, research has found. 

While many PSP workers have access to employer-funded mental health supports, many share conflicting views on the trustworthiness and effectiveness of these programs, according to a study combining an online survey of 644 PSP workers and follow-up interviews with 15 participants. 

The findings vary based on occupation — including border services officers, communicators, correctional workers, firefighters, paramedics, and police. Correctional workers and border services officers report the highest levels of work stress and psychological distress of any group, with 39 per cent of correctional workers scoring above the threshold for potential serious mental illness.  

Police officers have the lowest rate ( 18 per cent) of accessing internal peer support despite it being available to 88 per cent of them.  In contrast, paramedics have the highest access rate for internal peer support , available to 92 per cent of them, with 44 per cent having used it 

Despite this, many workers in the study  value extended health benefits, which were available to 77 per cent of PSP workers ,  allowing them to choose supports on their own terms. 

Megan Edgelow, an associate professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., conducted the study. She says while a lot of money has gone towards individual mental health programs, many don’t show a real outcome. 

““I want to be clear that I’m not trying to be negative about employers or question their efforts,” she says.  

“I’m increasingly seeing a broader perspective from employers about psychological health and safety. The more we can think about the big picture, the more we can actually prevent injuries — and that’s a better way to look at cost savings than putting reactive programs in place that people aren’t using and don’t find applicable.” 

Targeting workers, not root causes 

The main problem with these types of mental health programs, Edgelow says, is that they are built around helping individual workers without getting to the root cause of the stress in work environments. 

“We’re also getting to the point where a lot of workers are really tired of the word ‘resilience.’ It signals where the blame will be shifted — to you, the worker, for failing to be resilient — and it keeps the focus on the individual rather than what’s going on in the work environment,” she says. 

When working conditions don’t change, it can lead to workers feeling cynical about mental health programs. The study finds that for many PSP workers, the programs available do not address their main chronic stressors — including understaffing, conflict with colleagues and supervisors, and a feeling of low control over their work. 

“If we don’t make system-level changes, we’ll just stay where we are,” Edgelow says. 

She points to the National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, which will be relaunching to address workplace factors and how employers can fix them. 

Defaulting to easy fixes 

That gap between intention and impact comes down to where most mental health programs operate — at the bottom of what is known as the hierarchy of controls, says Peter Smith, a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health and faculty member at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in Toronto. 

At the top of the hierarchy, the focus is on eliminating the hazard entirely; at the bottom sits personal protective equipment (PPE) — items you give the individual worker to protect themselves. Most mental health programs, he says, sit at that bottom rung. 

“The equivalent of personal protective equipment when it comes to psychosocial exposures is usually things like yoga training or mindfulness training,” Smith says. “They have been shown in isolation to have fairly limited impacts.” 

Employers tend to default to these approaches not because they work, but because they are easy to implement and do not address any root issue, Smith says. 

Well marketed, poorly proven 

The study finds internal peer support programs, extended health benefits, and external mental health supports such as Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are the most commonly available. Only 38 per cent of workers with access to peer support say they use them — and many do not trust them.  

One respondent stated: “Most people at our organization avoid the peer support at all costs because it’s run mostly by management and we are afraid of being penalized for discussing what happened and how we feel.” 

Whether these programs show evidence of effectiveness or not, Edgelow says employers tend to reach for them because of how widely available and well-marketed they are. 

“I think a lot of these programs are well marketed, because the people providing them are being paid for a service. And employers genuinely want to support their workers. They look around in the environment and think, ‘This is what’s available, this is what other employers are doing. So, everybody moves toward it,” she says. 

Redesign through co-design 

The issue is not just what programs employers choose, Smith says, but how they go about choosing them. Before employers even think about what program to put in place, he says they need to ask themselves if they are ready to make real change. 

“Readiness isn’t based on do we have a program to put in. Readiness is based on ‘Do we have senior leadership commitment to do something about this?’” he says. 

The best solutions, Smith says, are created through co-design from both senior leadership and workers so they can address what is happening in the workplace.  

He points to  a study published in 2023 by Candinavian that found the same program could work in one workplace and completely fail in another — the difference was not the program itself but whether leadership was committed and whether workers were involved in designing it. 

The study looked at 52 different systematic reviews of 1000 workplace studies and concluded that organization interventions can be effective when implementation is done with specific workplace context . 

“You can get a lot more progress on good faith than you can on trying to grab a program that’s been designed for a general population, where really the conditions within your workplace probably require at least some type of tailoring to make it fit,” he says. 

Without that commitment, employers will keep spending money on programs that workers don’t use, don’t trust, and don’t need. 

“It’s about co-designing something that’s going to be feasible from the organizsation’s perspective, but effective from the employee’s perspective. That’s where spending time coming up with those solutions shows good faith from both sides. That’s where the management commitment comes in,” he says.