282 | ‘People Have Changed’: Hospitality industry deals with workers’ mental health in the age of COVID-19

The coronavirus crisis has put unprecedented amounts of stress not only on health care systems and economies but on workers’ mental health.

That’s the first and bottom line of a recent study by the Society of Human Resource Managers.

The professional association surveyed more than a thousand workers in mid-April and found that nearly half feel emotionally drained from their work. The younger the employee, the more likely they feel burned out.

Employees who feel totally sapped of energy are more prone to depression.

As state and local economies reopen amid the threat of COVID-19, citizens are getting back to daily living. But people are not the same as they were before the pandemic struck, experts say, and the nation’s workplaces may be where mental health issues become most obvious.

In this episode of Lodging Leaders, we focus on mental health in the workplace – particularly the hospitality industry which has been dramatically impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Featured in this report are Silpa Patel, a hotelier in Tennessee who has battled depression and now works with behavioral health organizations to eliminate the stigma of mental illness; Darcy Gruttadaro, director of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Foundation in Washington, D.C.; Wendi Safstrom, executive director of the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation in Alexandria, Va.; and Marjorie Morrison, co-founder and CEO of Psych Hub in Nashville, Tennessee.

Resources and Links

• Silpa Patel of Stigma Zero and the Tennessee Association of Alcohol, Drug and Other Addiction Services
• Darcy Gruttadaro of the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Foundation
• Wendi Safstrom, executive director of the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation
• Marjorie Morrison of PsychHub