Mental health needs to be treated as the foundation, not just another part of the well-being wheel, says TELUS Health’s Paula Allen
Each month at BPM, we offer a slate of articles and content pieces that go deep on a particular topic. This December, we’re exploring employee and plan members' well-being - and its link to mental health. This is the final article of this month's topic. We hope you enjoyed the series. See you in 2026!
Mental health and well-being are used almost interchangeably in corporate Canada. Yet, mental health experts believe that blurring these two areas is exactly how organizations fail their employees.
Denis Trottier, chief mental health officer at KPMG, wants employers to stop hiding mental health under a vague wellness umbrella. He sees mental health as specific, clinical and non-negotiable, while well-being has become a catch-all buzzword that lets employers feel busy without tackling the harder work. He leans hard on the idea that mental health is a medical issue rooted in the brain, while well-being is a much broader, more comfortable catch-all that employers and employees gravitate toward.
“We should differentiate because it gets lost. If we want to go by the book, mental health refers to emotional, psychological and social functioning. We all have mental health. Mental health is on a continuum. It changes as the day progresses,” he said.
Whereas well-being, by contrast, is much broader and far less precise for Trottier. He frames it as an overall quality-of-life question in terms of mental, physical, financial and social domains, with the list getting vaguer as it expands, he said.
Meanwhile, Paula Allen, global leader, and SVP research and client insights at TELUS Health, agrees that mental health needs to be treated as the foundation, not just another slice of a well-being wheel, while also suggesting that mental health is a continuum.
At one end is “optimum mental health,” where there’s nothing of a cognitive, mental and emotional nature that is changing someone’s path, she explained. At the other end is mental illness, where “the way your brain is functioning is somewhat disconnected, either significantly or moderately, from your environment,” she said.
Allen argues that treating mental health and well-being as identical can lead to employers neglecting one or the other. If organizations focus only on well-being, they tend to concentrate on how employees feel about their lives and work and overlook the basic clinical and structural supports required to protect mental health. That creates a false assumption that everyone can achieve good well-being on their own, even when some people lack those underlying safeguards.
“It’s clear from the data that we have and from a number of different points of view, is that mental health is foundational. It’s your starting point for everything, including physical health and self-care,” she added.
Still, Allen emphasized mental health is a health issue and not a lifestyle choice while well-being is different.
“Your well-being includes your sense of calm, comfort, satisfaction, control,” she said. You can have good mental health and still feel miserable with your life circumstances. “You could have good mental health but be quite unhappy with your life and not have a sense of well-being,” she said.
Allen sees psychological safety and daily work experience as the key link between the two noting that a toxic workplace will damage mental health, while a healthy one will bolster overall well-being.
Stacey Hummel, HR executive consultant at ADP Canada argues employers need to tackle well-being and mental health together but differently. Well-being programs should be proactive and include gym subsidies, yoga, healthy snacks, flexible hours, wellness committees, ergonomic assessments, walking meetings, stress training, financial workshops and recognition programs, while mental health supports should be targeted and reactive and include EAPs, mental health days, crisis resources, peer networks and mentorship opportunities.
She also highlights health spending accounts as a growing, effective well-being tool. By reducing out-of-pocket costs and being tax-free, they increase purchasing power, cut financial strain, and give employees greater confidence about handling unexpected health expenses, which in turn lowers money-related stress.
“A boost to an organization’s culture and morale translates into a stronger employer brand,” Hummel said in an email.
Meanwhile, Michelle Ann Zoleta agrees with Allen that employers have to accept their limits. Workplaces can’t fix what happens at home, but they can stop making things worse and build real supports instead of symbolic gestures.
“It’s important to treat them as related and distinct concepts because you need to understand that there’s a relation between the two. But not everything tied to mental health is going to be related to the workplace, because mental health can be affected by people’s personal lives outside of work,” noted Zoleta, health and safety manager at Peninsula Canada.
Where she pushes harder than many employers is on the grind of actually maintaining support and “the continuous effort of maintaining it,” underscoring it’s meaningless to run a burst of activities for a month or two and then go quiet as employees quickly see the gap between the messages.
In practice, she points to things like on-site activities, shared meals and social events that give people something positive to look forward to and break up the grind of constant workload. For Zoleta, these can be strategies to make work feel less overwhelming, build connection across teams and create a more engaging atmosphere.
Even more so, these small, consistent gestures - and not grand programs - are what genuinely strengthen employees’ well-being, asserted Zoleta.
Allen stressed that well-being is highly individual and changes with life stage, so employers can’t rely on generic programs. For some employees, “one of the most important things in terms of their own well-being might be a sense of purpose and recognition in the workplace,” she noted.
While that need is universal, she argues it can be especially critical for people early in their careers.
She applies the same lens to financial well-being as employers often assume that money coaching and planning tools are mainly for younger staff, but TELUS Health’s data earlier this year found there’s 40 per cent of employees over 40 who don’t have emergency savings.
Allen believes organizations need to protect mental health by avoiding harm and ensuring basic supports are in place. Then they should focus on shaping a healthy day-to-day work experience through recognition, psychological safety, clear communication about available resources and making people feel valued.
“There’s a need to be more strategic, more responsive and to move faster. But you have to bring your employees along for that ride as well,” said Allen. “That fundamental culture of mental health support and well-being is going to be much more important going forward. We've seen the increase in importance over the last little while, but we definitely see an acceleration in the very next short while.”
