Is Your Mental Health Journalism Intersectional?

Covering workplace mental health requires consideration of race, socioeconomics and disabilities. Therapists Sabrina Taylor and Jason Wang join EEOC counsel Sarah DeCosse to talk about why workplace mental health is anything but cookie cutter.
by Madeleine Sherer, National Press Foundation
Research shows that people of color and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds report higher levels of workplace stress and mental health issues, Dr. Sabrina Taylor told NPF’s Covering Mental Health in the Workplace Fellows.
Taylor, alongside Dr. Jason Wang and the EEOC’s Sarah DeCosse, spoke about how disabilities, race and socioeconomic status can show up in workplace wellness.
Key information from each panelist:
Dr. Sabrina Taylor, the president-elect of the Maryland Counseling Association and the owner of Benefits Understood Counseling Services LLC
Taylor said that while many companies are demonstrating greater enthusiasm for diversity and inclusion now, they must make constant efforts toward improvement.
“I find that the companies that are successful in reducing discrimination and bias, they put [DEI] into practice. It’s more than lip service, it’s more than having it written down in a policy or doing the annual training on DEI,” Taylor said.
Taylor added that DEI trainings can do harm as well, if they are not implemented properly. She said that in situations where there are only a few people of color present for the trainings, they often end up falling into spokesperson roles, where they are expected to represent their race for the sake of educating their white peers.
“That puts a lot of pressure on them. It creates anxiety. Many don’t want to go or they may call out sick because they do not want to sit through another training where they have to be the representative for their entire race,” Taylor said.
Sarah DeCosse, assistant legal counsel for the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Genetic Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) Division of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)
There has been a 16.9% increase in ADA charge receipts from 2013 to 2023, according to U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission data that DeCosse shared. Anxiety Disorder charges jumped the largest with a 7.1% increase.
“There has been a very significant rise in terms of the charges that we receive that are making allegations of discrimination in the workplace linked to mental health disabilities,” DeCosse said.
Dr. Jason Wang, a psychotherapist and owner of Inflection Points Therapy
Wang spoke about unemployed, underemployed and precariously employed people and how financial loss and emotional hardships play a role.
“Financial stress exacerbates everything, but I think we are a culture that prioritizes and exalts work so that if you are not working, for example, in some of the more privileged clients I see, they still feel unseen by society,” Wang said. “‘Useless’ is a word I hear a lot, and ‘unwanted’ is a word I hear a lot.”
“We can either see our work as a job, we can see it as a career, or we can see it as a calling. And I think these days it’s definitely shifted as a culture towards seeing work as a calling. It has to be meaningful, it has to be socially useful. And so when we don’t get those things, then we’re missing a calling in life. And so that’s a really big deal,” Wang said.
Speakers: Sabrina Taylor, Benefits Understood Counseling Services; Jason Wang, Therapist and Owner, Inflection Points Therapy; and Sarah DeCosse, Assistant Legal Counsel for ADA and GINA, EEOC U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
Summary, transcript and resources: nationalpress.org/topic/menta...
This program is sponsored by the Luv U Project, with associate sponsors the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Department of Mental Health and the American Psychological Association. The National Press Foundation is solely responsible for its content.
This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios.