Is mental health at work really an awareness problem? If people just understood stigma better, I thought, they’d naturally become more supportive colleagues and managers. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Anti‑stigma workshops come and go in different workplaces. People show up, listen, and nod in agreement. But when they go right back to the same habits and assumptions, what impact do these workshops really have?
Research shows anti-stigma training can improve knowledge and even change some attitudes, but sustaining real change in how people behave toward colleagues with mental health challenges is far more difficult (Hanisch et al., 2016; Dewa et al., 2023; Thornicroft et al., 2023). However, this difficulty is not the end of the story. Effective anti-stigma training in the workplace takes a different approach.
Sitting through one of these workshops can feel promising in the moment. Maybe a trainer shares powerful stories, or a video shows a colleague speaking about their challenges with depression. Then the training ends and you’re immediately pulled back into deadlines, performance reviews, and the expectations to look strong at all times. The norms of the workplace usually win out over anything you hear in a single workshop.
The research backs up that experience. A 2016 systematic review of workplace anti‑stigma programs found that many interventions do improve employees’ mental health knowledge and confidence to support others, and can even reduce discriminatory behaviors in the short term. However, the studies were often small, methodologically weak, and rarely tracked what happened beyond the first follow‑up. In other words, the research shows that these trainings spark change, but there’s far less evidence that the change actually sticks over time (Hanisch et al., 2016).
A more recent study focusing specifically on workplace stigma, including small and medium‑sized businesses, shows a similar pattern. A 2023 review concluded that interventions can reduce stigma and improve knowledge, but the overall evidence is still limited by few high‑quality trials, short follow‑ups, and inconsistent outcomes. Many programs rely heavily on self‑reported attitude shifts right after training, instead of tracking whether employees actually behave differently months later, such as speaking up when a colleague is mocked, or feeling safe enough to seek support themselves (Ditta Tóth et al., 2023).
There’s also the issue surrounding the intended purpose of these studies. A lot of workplace anti‑stigma efforts seek to make individual employees nicer, more informed, and more empathetic. That’s not a bad goal, but if it leaves out the structural power of supervisors, HR policies, and organizational culture, what impact is it really having? A 2023 systematic review of anti‑stigma advocacy for health professionals found that while programs can build advocacy skills and awareness, they rarely integrate those skills into formal roles, policies, or performance expectations (Guerrero et al., 2023).
Without structural backup, it’s easy for people to default to old habits. If a manager is evaluated solely on productivity and cost cutting, not on how they handle mental health concerns, it sends a message that compassion in the workplace is optional. Many of the interventions reviewed in workplace settings were relatively short, often ranging from a few hours to a couple of days, which isn’t much time to unlearn deeply ingrained stereotypes about mental illness or to transform how conflict, performance concerns, or leaves of absence are handled (Hanisch et al., 2016; Ditta Tóth et al., 2023).
Time is another reason these changes always pan out. Only a minority of workplace anti‑stigma studies followed participants beyond the immediate post‑training window, and even when they did, follow‑ups might stop at a few months to two years. Some gains in knowledge and helping behavior seemed to last, but shifts in attitudes were less consistent (Hanisch et al., 2016).
Additionally, programs for health professionals that focused only on information often failed to address implicit bias or the more hidden ways stigma shows up in clinical decisions and everyday interactions. The more effective approaches tended to include interactive elements, reflection on one’s own biases, and involvement of people with lived experience. But even then, the evaluations didn’t always capture whether these insights translated into sustained behavior change (Guerrero et al., 2023).
So what makes anti-stigma training stick? The most effective interventions are multimodal rather than a single lecture. They combine education with interactive skills practice, realistic scenarios, and, most importantly, the voices of people with lived experience of mental illness (Tóth et al., 2023; Guerrero et al., 2023). They tend to give people concrete calls to action for specific situations at work, rather than just abstract awareness (Hanisch et al., 2016). Plus, well-designed online and blended trainings have proven as effective as in-person ones, and far shorter (Tóth et al., 2023).
The evidence from these studies show that workplace anti‑stigma efforts can work, but only under conditions that support real, sustained change. It may call for repeated and interactive education, visible leadership buy‑in, policies that actually protect people who speak up, and ongoing evaluation that looks beyond short‑term attitude shifts to long‑term behavior and culture. Until more workplaces commit to that deeper level of transformation, most anti‑stigma trainings will likely keep feeling like a meaningful first step. But it may fail to accomplish what that first step originally sets outs for.
References
- Hanisch, S. E., Twomey, C. D., Szeto, A. C., Birner, U. W., Nowak, D., & Sabariego, C. (2016). The effectiveness of interventions targeting the stigma of mental illness at the workplace: A systematic review. BMC Psychiatry, 16, 1–11.
- Zoe Guerrero, Barbara Iruretagoyena, Sarah Parry and Claire Henderson. (2023). Anti‑stigma advocacy for health professionals: A systematic review. Journal of Mental Health.
- Mónika Ditta Tóth, Sarah Ihionvien, … György Purebl and colleagues. (2023). Evidence for the effectiveness of interventions to reduce mental health‑related stigma in the workplace: A systematic review. BMJ Open, 13(1), e067126.
~ Dillon Price
Dillon Price is a native of Western Massachusetts. He has worked as a content writer for over eight years and is the owner and founder of EnRoute Jobs, a niche job board designed for digital nomads, travelers, and expats.