Business Development Bank of Canada will begin inviting select clients to register for three hours of free virtual therapy with GreenShield Health, a tentative first step in exploring whether a Crown lender can do something to reverse a troubling increase in stress among entrepreneurs.
BDC will cover 550 clients on a first-come, first-served basis. The pilot project will target smaller companies with 10 or fewer employees. The bank will send an offer today to a first tranche of 4,000 business owners. BDC won’t know who signs up, only how many. After a time it will send a second tranche of emails, and continue until all 550 slots are filled.
BDC has been surveying clients on the state of their mental health at the start of each year since 2018. The early results suggested there was reason for concern, but not alarm. BDC began offering advice on well-being and posting tips on subjects such as how to delegate and confronting imposter syndrome.
Then the numbers spiked: the 2023 survey reported that 45 per cent of business owners said they were struggling with mental health challenges such as burnout or depression, compared with 38 per cent in 2022. Chief executive Isabelle Hudon decided BDC needed to do more than just talk about mental health.
“The mental pressure is real,” Hudon said in an interview. The 2023 survey also suggested there was a desire to seek help, a rare sign of vulnerability from a group populated by alphas. About a third of respondents indicated they wanted to seek support from a mental health professional, compared with 21 per cent in 2022. “They do recognize that personally, as a leader, they need help,” Hudon said. “We’re a development bank and we’re supposed to be there for entrepreneurs, and not only to deliver financial support.”
Hudon, a former Sun Life executive who took over at BDC in 2021 after serving as Canada’s ambassador to France, said she likes to put up big numbers as much as any other banker. But a Crown corporation can do more than fill gaps in the market and send the federal government fat dividends each year. She reminds interlocutors that the “D” in BDC stands for “development.” That doesn’t mean BDC should be run like a non-profit, but Hudon thinks she has a responsibility to level the playing field for groups that have been marginalized by the financial system and to back companies that are keen to fight climate change and some of society’s other big problems. Getting involved in what has the look of a crisis fits that mission.
“For BDC to get into the conversation of mental health is non-negotiable,” said Hudon, who acknowledged that she had to overcome some internal resistance to the idea that a lender should involve itself in something that tends to be seen as a social issue. The project, “is not supported by all,” she said. “That’s OK. There is no one who is completely against (it), but it’s not unanimous, and that’s probably a fair representation of the society in which we live.”
Every push helps. The number of Canadians aged 15 and older with a generalized anxiety disorder doubled to 5.2 per cent between 2012 and 2022, while the number of Canadians who experienced a major depressive episode over the previous 12 months increased to 7.6 per cent from 4.7 per cent a decade earlier, Statistics Canada said in a report published in September. Some 18 per cent of Canadians met the diagnostic criteria for having a mood, anxiety or substance-use disorder, but only about half those people reported having seen a professional about their mental health.
Bias and stigma remain significant obstacles to getting people to take care of themselves, said Tatijana Busic, a Toronto-based organizational psychologist who coaches leaders on integrating psychology and mental wellness into business strategy. “If you identify as a homo sapien, you have what’s called a mental health, a mental world,” she said. “Why not learn to work with this biologically based system? If you don’t develop the tools to work with this system, the system will just do its thing.”
There’s reason to assume entrepreneurs will resist taking their mental health seriously, in part because so many assume extreme stress comes with the job. “Founders have to put on a brave face,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said on a recent episode of the “Tetragrammaton” podcast. “They have to always basically act like everything is going great or otherwise it will shake confidence and they’ll lose team members and they won’t be able to raise money or whatever, so you always have to act like it’s going really well.”
That attitude isn’t exclusive to the high-risk-high-reward culture of Silicon Valley. For years, Peter Neal, co-founder of snack maker Neal Brothers Brands, ignored signs of hereditary mental illness. It was understood that his paternal grandmother committed suicide, but no one talked about it. Then, he and his wife spent years finding treatment for his daughter’s mental illness, including suicidal ideation. Yet Neal never stopped to consider that he could be at risk. “Friends called me ‘Happy Petey,’” he said. “Suddenly, I wasn’t.”
In 2019, Neal suffered three successive traumas: a close friend committed suicide, a new business he was building fell apart, and a brand that accounted for about 45 per cent of Neal Brothers’ revenue left for a different distributor. He experienced two bouts of months-long depression during which he considered suicide, and eventually was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ADHD. “The mind becomes … an incredibly powerful monster,” he said.
BDC’s program won’t work miracles; Busic said it generally takes eight to 12 hours of counselling to make a difference. Hudon is aware of that. She said her hope is that making it easier for entrepreneurs to get over whatever reservations they have will help people see that mental health is no different than physical health, and that they will seek out a therapist on their own just as they would a fitness trainer or a nutritionist.
“We are trying to be helpful by making those services available and somewhat free,” Hudon said. “We also know that three sessions will not solve and not be it, but we feel it’s the right first step.”
Kevin Carmichael is The Logic’s economics columnist and editor-at-large. He has spent more than two decades covering economics, business and finance for outlets including Bloomberg News, The Globe and Mail and the Financial Post, where he also served as editor-in-chief.
