In 1979, not many people would have shared Dr. Robert Wilson’s vision of creating an employer-sponsored psychological health benefit for workers with mental health issues. As Wilson says today, the common view at the time was that employers had no right to interfere in the personal affairs of their employees.
But his experience setting up mental health centres in northern communities for the British Columbia government convinced the PhD and registered psychologist of the need for workplace mental health benefits. Developing such a benefit was one thing. Explaining to employers why they should provide it to their employees was another. But gradually, one employer after another got the message and signed on the dotted line.
Now, more than 30 years later, Wilson is recognized as a pioneer in employee mental health and an innovator with a long list of groundbreaking initiatives that helped to improve access to psychological care for countless Canadian workers and their families. Human Solutions, the company he founded—and recently retired from—has become one of the largest employee assistance providers in Canada.
As well as introducing the first psychological health benefit in Canada, Wilson was ahead of the marketplace in recognizing the connection between a healthy workplace, healthy employees and a healthy business. In 1980, he teamed up with Dr. Greg Banwell, an organizational and industrial psychologist, to offer employee assistance programs (EAPs) and organizational services such as organizational surveys, selection tools and workplace mediation. “Our program wasn’t really an EAP,” says Wilson today, explaining that EAPs typically provide referrals to care and services, while his company offered a full treatment service including diagnosis and therapy through clinical doctoral-level psychologists. “But EAPs were just coming to Canada, and we began calling it that to fit into the market.”
Always a little different from the rest and ahead of the curve, Wilson initiated critical incident stress and trauma debriefing programs, and his company was the first to lead the industry in delivering online services. Crown Life became the first insurance company in the world to offer psychological benefits when it agreed to sell Wilson’s product. Over the years, Wilson has been a frequent speaker on topics related to mental health, and he has published numerous research reports. Throughout it all, he’s continued to see patients at his North Vancouver office every Tuesday.
“I’m pleased the industry has realized the importance of providing a service for mental health,” he says. “These days, the workplace is often a source of psychological problems, so it’s more important than ever to provide a healthy environment at work.”
Yet, despite his success, Wilson is dismayed that investment in psychological benefits still gets short shrift compared to other health benefits. “It astounds me that psychological benefits are the only benefit that has continually gone down in cost over the years,” he laments. “It shows a total lack of respect for the need for psychological care, even though there are more days off work for depression than for diabetes and heart disease combined.”
True to character, Wilson’s approach to such frustrations is to create another “first,” this time a product with 20 hours of therapy targeted at people with serious depression and/or anxiety disorder. “The results are astounding,” he says. “It helps people get back to work.”
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