One in four people in the UK will experience a mental health issue at some point in their life. While mental health challenges are widespread, most are mild, short-term, and can be effectively treated. However, only one in eight individuals with a mental health condition receives the appropriate treatment.
Better Mental Wealth was founded to tackle this issue. We envision a future where everyone has access to personalised, effective interventions for mental health challenges, leading to both predictive and positive outcomes. Poor mental health not only has significant long-term effects on individuals, but also carries substantial financial costs for businesses. Our mission is to help alleviate this burden for both individuals and organizations.
Our Better Mental Wealth Objective Programmes are crafted for forward-thinking organisations committed to monitoring and improving the mental health of their workforce to the highest standards. Ultimately, our goal is to help organisations create the most productive and thriving environment possible.
Recent large-scale reports have highlighted the significant cost of poor mental health to UK businesses and the economy as a whole, with staggering statistics. Below, we present some key findings from the 2021 Deloitte report on the issue.
Poor mental health in the workplace costs UK businesses up to £45 billion. These costs stem from absenteeism (employees’ intentional or habitual absence from work), presenteeism (working while sick), and staff turnover.
Since the last major Deloitte report in 2017, presenteeism has increased. Employees are attending work despite poor mental health but remain unproductive, leading to higher costs, even though sickness absence rates have decreased.
When comparing this data to the current number of people employed in the UK, this translates to an average cost of £1,652 per employee each year, regardless of whether they are officially sick. The breakdown of costs by industry reveals that some sectors are more heavily impacted than others.
![Image showing cost breakdown by industry]
However, there is reason for optimism. Early mental health interventions in the workplace are highly effective and offer significant return on investment for businesses. For every £1 spent on reactive mental health support, employers see a £3 return. For every £1 spent on proactive mental health support, the return increases to £5. Furthermore, every £1 invested in organisational-wide culture and awareness raising generates a £6 return for employers.
Our programmes are designed to offer the best investment for companies, providing the tools necessary to improve mental health and wellbeing across the organisation. As stated in the report: "Employers should screen individuals to provide targets and early-stage support to prevent their mental condition from worsening." This is exactly what our Better Objective Programmes are designed to achieve.
Employers have a responsibility to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of their employees, as well as anyone else impacted by their business. At Better Mental Wealth, we work with organizations to help them take all feasible steps to fulfill this duty.
Our Better Objective Programmes are specifically designed to proactively enhance the mental health of everyone within the organization. We also empower employees to voice their perspectives, helping to create a more productive and thriving environment for all.
We support organisasions in cultivating an open, positive culture where everyone can thrive. Our mission is to help us all Be Mentally Healthy Together.
Better Mental Wealth and the grounded research team at Rotherham, Doncaster and South Humbar (RDaSH) NHS Foundation Trust have entered into a joint partnership, for the purposes of research and evaluation.
As part of our partnership, we are conducting innovative research for the purposes of improving the ways in which clinicians can understand objective measures of patient mental health.
Some of the work we are look at includes: (1) How clinicians determine the most effective outpatient psychotherapy for patients. (2) Helping clinicians predict treatment responses to particular treatments, such as antidepressent medications, in an objective fashion that can be monitored over time. (3) How we understand and characterise mental health conditions, in an objective way, by phenotyping patients.
