Care providers deserve care, too. - Behavioral Health Coach Headspace Employee Review

The mental health care system is broken. It’s not just a supply and demand problem—that’s sales talk. The problem is not just with the economy of the mental health care business, it’s with the moral, ethical and spiritual void that comes with treating well-being as a business, and mental health care workers as its machine. Pre-merger Ginger was an organization that set out to decrease barriers between any person and immediate mental health support. Evidently, it never intended to create that world for the people who helped build it, and because of that, it fails to be revolutionary. It progresses because care workers (coaches and therapists) are overworked and asked to meet unreachable demands. Though this company claims to “disrupt” mental health care, it runs into the exact same traps other organizations do. Exploitation is not present and obvious all at once. When we bank on visionary ideas without sufficient, sustainable measures in place to ensure the wellness of workers, what we see are that rights, privileges and compassion are stripped away, one by one, little bits at a time. We cannot survive on mission alone. The on-demand care that coaches provide is what makes the company’s product special, differentiating them from a saturated market. The cost: coaches are member-facing at nearly all times, chatting with multiple people at once about their mental health issues for hours, not allowed to take breaks when needed, but only when someone above them has chosen. I have had experiences of losing time, not being able to get a drink of water or eat meals, taking my laptop to the bathroom, spending 5+ hours unable to take my eyes away from a screen so that I can get a glimpse of the outside world. Since working for this company, I have a gained a shorter attention span from continual multitasking. The care team routinely has PTO requests denied (even while the company touted “uncounted time off”—this policy has since changed making it even easier to deny requests) due to coverage needs. Many coaches work at odd, inconvenient times that disrupt sleep cycles and keep us from being able to spend time with friends and family, and we have asked over and over again to be given better options. We do not get to join company meditations during a shift or enjoy many of the perks of community-building that others do. Because we are highly trained and fairly attuned individuals, we are keenly aware of how much quality of care is sacrificed by quantity. We deal with that by training ourselves to care less, otherwise we would have no confidence left in our abilities. Some of us cry throughout our shifts. Leadership alleges to measure our stress levels by giving us rudimentary scaling popups, which many of us just click at feverishly to get it out of the way, since we are expected to respond to chats in under 1-2 minutes. There was once a time in which these feedback measures directly impacted the worker, in that when a worker indicated a high level of stress, the algorithm would redirect additional work away from them. Leadership found that workers were “misusing” this, leading to “inequity of workload” and took it away. Was this truly misuse, or an honest indicator of individual levels of capacity? Any conversations acknowledging their ableism do not take place. When faced with real time, challenging questions and concerns about working conditions, leadership response reads as cold, lacking empathy, jaded (“We know your pain points already. We’ve heard it before”, “If you’re unhappy with the changes we’re making, this company isn’t a good fit”). We are told that we suffer because we lack self-care, that we don’t meditate enough. We are told that our complaints are fostering a “negative” environment in which those who are already successful are unable to thrive. We are siloed away into pods of 12 or less people so that dissent does not spread. So that those in upper levels are able to distance themselves from our voices. Those who single themselves out as advocates for their team are gaslit, bullied into silence, or outright fired. The same can be said for mental health workers who disclose having their own mental health conditions. Many coaches have gone on a leave of absence just to get some respite. This is a company fueled by manufactured urgency due to uneven distribution of duties and hierarchical structures. Everyone is burnt out but pressured to perform. Everyone is supposed to be “a happy little dot” no matter what. All these companies ever want to talk about is how they are going to “change the world” while saying very little to nothing about the art of nurturing those changes into longevity, which must include care within its own community. While we’re busy disrupting the system, who walks through the rubble in the aftermath? When we break the world to make a better one, who gets invited into that better world? Don’t those who helped to build it all deserve a seat at the table?