If you have family, friends or colleagues who live with mental illnesses, you may be unsure of how to speak to them in a respectful way. You want to show you care, but don’t know how to express your concern and not hurt the person at the same time.

Just ask…

1. Can you help me understand what it’s like living with your condition?
2. Is there anything you need from me or something I can do to help you?
3. Can we do something together – get coffee, go for a walk or see a movie?
   Just because the person has mental illness doesn’t mean he/she won’t want to do regular activities
4. What is your diagnosis and how do you feel about it?
5. Do you need to talk?
   Sometimes talking can help make things feel a little better.
6.  What can I do to be there for you, and help you feel supported?
7. How can I support you – can I listen to you, leave you alone, give you a hug?
8.  How has living with this condition shaped who you are today?
9. How are you? You don’t seem like yourself, and I want to know how you’re really feeling because I care about you.

Find Help and More Information Regarding Mental Illness

Help is available. For additional information, visit MagellanHealth.com/MYMH.

For more information on treatment resources, contact:
National Institute of Mental Health
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/find-help/index.shtml

NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness)
http://www.nami.org/

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) https://findtreatment.samhsa.gov/https://www.mentalhealth.gov/

Mental Health.gov
https://www.mentalhealth.gov/
Help is available. For additional information, visit MagellanHealth.com/MYMH

Read more about Mental Illness from Magellan Health Insights

Holidays are meant to be a joyful time celebrating with family and friends, enjoying time off from work, and indulging in delicious meals. That said, it is also easy to get overwhelmed and anxious as you try to keep up with multiple demands on your personal, family and work life.

Try these sanity savers to help you find the right balance so you can focus on making positive memories this holiday season:

• Keep it simple (and be realistic): Perfection is overrated. Don’t put pressure on yourself by committing to every party or making your own party a gala event. Focus on what makes the holidays special for you.
• Set aside differences: Try to accept family members and friends as they are, even if they don’t live up to all of your expectations. Set aside grievances until a more appropriate time for discussion.
• Stick to a budget: Before you start shopping for gifts, food, and decorations, decide how much money you can afford to spend. Don’t try to buy happiness with excessive gifts or lavish meals.
• Plan ahead: Identify possible challenges that can trigger stress and develop an action plan to feel prepared to deal with them. Set specific days for shopping, cooking, traveling, visiting friends, and other activities.
• Keep healthy habits: Don’t let the holidays become a free- for-all. Overindulgence only adds to your stress and guilt. Get plenty of sleep and make as much time for exercise as you can.
• Take a breather: Pay attention to your own needs and feelings. Spend a little time by yourself if you can. Meditate, do some relaxation breathing, or go for a short walk.
• Control the controllable: As families change and grow, traditions often do as well. Choose a few to hold on to, and be open to creating new ones and finding new ways to celebrate together.

Take steps to prevent stress and find peace and happiness this holiday season.

During National Depression Awareness Month, we wanted to take some time to discuss the very normal stress and mental health challenges working families experience as we are increasingly connected to our jobs. As our connectivity to work has grown – between email, texting, chats, phone calls, video conferencing calls, and a myriad of social networking sites – so has the challenge to separate work from our personal lives. Employees are spending an increasing amount of time both at work and thinking about work. Habits such as checking email during a family dinner or ruminating about that email that you’d forgotten to write in bed at night are common experiences for many. Add on top of that a child who’s acting out and a parent who needs a little extra care both physically and financially, and you have a recipe for stress that affects your own health and mindset, as well as potentially relationships with family, friends or colleagues.

Employee assistance programs (EAPs) have been adopted by many employers to reduce the impact of mental health disorders, workplace stress and other work/life issues on workplace productivity. Despite the ubiquity of this employee benefit, which is offered by 97 percent of large employers, utilization hovers around five percent industry-wide. A primary barrier is the stigma of utilizing EAP programs, which were historically grown from occupational substance abuse programs.

While great strides have been made in reducing stigma, a great opportunity lies in changing the premise that stands in the way of employees tapping into services that might help them move forward and find their best self. What if we were to fundamentally remove the premise that there are people with “issues” and people without? The reality is that every employee is faced with their own brand of “juggle,” and stress and anxiety continue to be on the rise as working families live increasingly busy lives.

As Magellan transforms the EAP benefit for modern day workers and their families, we’re driven to provide resources and tools to help people address their mental health challenges before they severely impact their lives and productivity. The pivot lies in helping employees take care of their mental health as a practice of self-improvement and in helping employers position EAP services in their culture of well-being.

There are three essential components to powering this shift in the transformed EAP:

• Clinically-validated online programs and mobile apps that help employees track and change habits and mindsets
• When employees experience a bump in the road, convenient access to a coach or therapist that can fit into their harried day
• Content that inspires, motivates and helps employees feel validated in the normalcy of their stress and feel connected to others tackling similar experiences

Imagine a world where employees give each other a high five for taking some “me” time, leveraging a convenient method of choice, just as they do for someone sticking to their gym routine or running their first 5k. We certainly do!

As a former Medicaid recipient who relied on treatment from community behavioral health centers, I know first-hand the transformative power a peer specialist can have a in a person’s life.

In my late teens and early twenties, I bounced from state hospitals to crisis stabilization units desperate to end my life. I had no hope that the goals I had envisioned prior to these struggles could be realized. When I started working with a peer specialist, I began to view myself and my future in a more positive light. My peer specialist expected me to recover and connected me to the resources and supports that empowered my recovery process. The painful experiences of my past paired with skills and knowledge of the healthcare system have provided me a platform for me to help others while creating lasting change. The opportunity to do such meaningful, passion-filled work for more than 40 hours of my week keeps me inspired and grateful to be a part of helping our members’ lead healthy and vibrant lives.

The work we do through Magellan Complete Care of Florida’s peer navigation program is literally changing the trajectory of peoples’ lives. Peer support offers hope to the hopeless. It helps our members see new possibility in a life that feels limited. I often tell the team that they have the hardest job in healthcare, as the members we support have multiple chronic health conditions, may live in poverty, and have challenges getting their basic needs met, such as food and housing. The team is 100 percent field-based and every day they show up and not only listen and support our members, but are willing to share pieces of their own story to inspire hope and change. The results have been nothing less than extraordinary. We’ve seen decreased inpatient days and a reduction in healthcare spending, but more importantly, members are re-engaging in their community and reaching goals related to their health and wellness. We bear witness to life change as members discover their power and break through barriers to accomplish what had once been buried dreams.

These potentially life changing interactions happen every single day with our staff and the members they touch. There are a lot of examples of member success stories, but here are two that underscore the power of peer support:

• Kevin’s low self-esteem led him to live a very unhappy and socially reclusive life. Driven by fear of the world and feelings of being uncared for, Kevin attempted suicide. Thanks to the support provided by Magellan Complete Care through a peer specialist that visits him weekly, Kevin now lives a positive and socially involved life. He enjoys spending time with his new friends and communicating with his peer specialist.
• Joe struggled with debilitating challenges such as depression, suicidal attempts, chronic homelessness, wheelchair-boundedness, severe eye health problems, frequent hospital admissions, inconsistent medication usage and medical follow-ups. Magellan Complete Care worked with Joe to move toward the road to recovery through a complex case management program with a care coordination team and a peer support specialist. The team linked Joe to medical and psychiatric providers, a mental health agency and helped him obtain an independent living facility, food stamps, a new wheelchair, phone, eye glasses, and transportation assistance to attend appointments and follow-ups. Magellan Complete Care also assisted Joe in obtaining a referral for a prosthetic leg. Magellan then linked Joe with a job agency to support his goal of acquiring a job.

The members’ feelings of hope, pride, and self-confidence are contagious and we share these feelings when we reflect on the difference the health plan and staff makes in members lives. Our members are changing their own lives, but ours are changing along with them.

When you think about giving back this holiday season, remember those persons serving as caregivers for the loved ones in your life.  Caregiving is one of life’s highest honors, but on the flip side it can also be physically and emotionally draining, especially during the holidays.  The added stress of having to balance holiday activities like shopping and visiting relatives and friends with caregiving responsibilities can be overwhelming, and may leave caregivers feeling frustrated, isolated, depressed and exhausted.

Caregiving today affects almost everyone – over 43 million adults in the United States have provided unpaid care to an adult or child in the past 12 months.

Bring a little joy to the world

There are a number of things you can do to help ease the burden for the caregivers in your life.  Here are some suggestions:

• Ask how you can help – This is the simplest approach. Begin by recognizing the caregiver’s role and ask about her or his concerns during the holiday season.  If you encounter resistance because the caregiver doesn’t feel that responsibilities can be set aside, make some suggestions about ways you can help without causing more stress.  For example, you could talk about family activities –are they able to attend, is the timing convenient, is there something you could do to help them prepare?
• Provide respite – Caregivers have their own holiday tasks to accomplish and more importantly, they need time to take care of themselves.  You could sit with a loved one for a few hours or help schedule in-home care for a period of time.  Perhaps spending time with the caregiver is the break they need.  Get together for coffee and companionship.
• Offer your services – With numerous responsibilities, there are bound to be a few things on the back burner that you could help a caregiver with.  Ask about needed home repairs, installing equipment to make their life easier or making a trip to the store or post office.  Could you assist with shopping or addressing holiday cards and getting them in the mail?
• Simplify traditions – Just because you’ve always done something doesn’t mean that the tradition must continue exactly as it was. Adapting activities to make them less stressful – and more enjoyable – is a win-win for everyone involved.  Plan ahead to ensure the space and timing is conducive. Something as easy as eating earlier in the day could benefit transportation arrangements, or keep caregiving needs on schedule.

Don’t limit recognition of the caregiver to the holidays.  The fact that you care enough to recognize the unique situation, the work performed, and to reach out may be enough to give the caregiver joy.  A burden shared is a burden lightened.

Keep up the good work

While holiday stress happens once a year, family caregivers are at an increased risk for burnout, depression, substance abuse, chronic illness and a host of other maladies year round.  In addition, there are a variety of caregiving situations that require special support, including long-distance caregiving and those caregivers in the sandwich generation who are caring for parents and their own children at the same time.

Check out the following tips and resources to see how you can support caregivers:

Long Distance Caregiving 

The Sandwich Generation

Finding and Choosing Respite Care Services

Caring for the Caregiver

10 Fast Facts About Caregivers

Consumerization of products continues to drive new innovations across the marketplace. For example, you can use your smartphone as a GPS device, to request a car service directly to your house and to shop for a new car online, seeing the prices other people paid in real time. In banking, we’ve seen the transition from teller to the ATM to online banking, smartphone banking and now, using your smartphone as a smart pay device. Underscoring all of these innovations is the desire to make whatever experience the consumer is engaging in easier, simpler and more personalized.

Healthcare is no different. Across the healthcare continuum, companies like ours are finding new and innovative ways to enhance member engagement and participation in the healthcare journey, particularly through computerized or mobile devices. Think about how healthcare has changed over the past 50 years – house calls from doctors to office visits to telephone triage and now, computerized therapy and text therapy.

At Magellan, we’ve invested in a unique type of computerized therapy – Computerized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CCBT) – to help individuals seek the therapy they need, in the comfort, convenience and privacy of their own home. Our CCBT programs were originally developed more than 20 years ago, for stand-alone personal computer use, but have since been developed for use on the internet and mobile devices, in both English and Spanish.

 The following five conditions make up more than 90 percent of behavioral health complaints in adults, and are present in more than 25 percent of adults:

• Insomnia
• Depression
• Anxiety
• Substance Abuse
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

Within each condition, studies have shown CCBT to be effective at reducing symptoms and severity. Importantly, our CCBT programs have undergone clinical trials involving more than 1,000 patients and have received endorsements and recognition from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, the United Kingdom’s National Institute of Clinical Excellence, Accreditation Canada and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration’s National Registry. Underscoring all of the studies and reviews, what can members expect? Sixty-nine percent of users show meaningful improvement within 30 days.

But CCBT isn’t just for members. We’ve found that providers can use a tool called Smart Screening to help screen individuals and triage them to the most appropriate levels of care on the CCBT platform, and in person, for the most serious cases. Various levels of screening can help direct individuals to CCBT, directly to an in-person counselor or a mix of both. Through this triage system, 90 percent of engaged participants rate this program as helpful and useful, and 75 percent of individuals actually prefer a non-medication care option when asked.

The most important thing about innovation in any industry – healthcare, banking or electronics – is refusing to rest on your laurels. There are new start-ups launched everyday whose mission it is to disrupt the status quo and provide new ways of doing things. As healthcare evolves, we plan to do the same.