May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s a moment when employers, HR teams, and benefits leaders turn their attention to the emotional wellbeing of their workforce. But if your mental health strategy starts and ends with mental health benefits, you may be missing one of the most powerful levers you have.
According to new data from HealthJoy’s latest report, The 2027 Renewal Crisis: Predictive Insights to Build Better Benefits Strategies, nearly half of all members (49.7%) reported a mental health concern in 2025. But the more revealing finding isn’t the prevalence. It’s what's sitting underneath it.
We uncovered that 60% of members who report chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) pain are also struggling with a mental health concern. It’s a sobering statistic. Three out of five people dealing with a bad back, persistent joint pain, or a chronic MSK condition are simultaneously carrying a mental health burden, including anxiety and depression.,
The question employers should be asking isn’t just how to treat these conditions once they surface. It’s whether their benefits platform can identify who’s at risk before a crisis arrives. That’s the difference between a reactive system and one that anticipates what your workforce needs.
Chronic pain is exhausting. It disrupts sleep, limits mobility, and erodes the small moments of daily life that people rely on to feel like themselves. Over time, that erosion can take a toll. And conversely, anxiety and depression have the potential to lower pain thresholds, reduce the motivation to pursue treatment, and make recovery that much slower and harder. These comorbid conditions amplify one another.
Every demographic group in HealthJoy’s data saw increases in this comorbidity. Among men, the rate of co-occurring chronic pain and mental health concerns rose 8.3% in just one year. This is a signal that no employer should ignore.
Perhaps the most hopeful data point we uncovered is that the people least likely to raise their hand and ask for help are starting to in greater numbers.
Men saw a 5.4% year-over-year increase in mental health reporting. Additionally, Adults over the age of 65, who are historically the most silent demographic when it comes to acknowledging mental health struggles, saw the largest increase of any group at 6.3% year-over-year. Women continue to report at higher rates overall compared to men (53.9% vs. 40.5% for men), but the direction of change among men and the 65+ cohort is significant and creates opportunities.
For years, employers have asked: ‘How do we get employees to actually use mental health resources?’ The answer has always been partly about stigma. If people feel shame about admitting they’re struggling, they’re less likely to ask for help. That wall appears to be coming down, even if slowly.
But here’s the problem. Even when employees are willing to ask for help, in many cases, they can’t get it.
HealthJoy’s Member Services team found that 47% of mental health provider listings in traditional carrier directories are either inaccurate or unavailable, or “ghost networks.” These are providers who have moved, stopped accepting new patients, or left the network entirely, but are still showing up in the directory. An employee who summons the courage to find a therapist, only to hit a wall of disconnected phone numbers and full waitlists, often doesn’t try again, and that silence has consequences.
Rising demand for mental health support is meaningless — or worse — counterproductive, if the pathway to care is simply broken.
Most benefits packages are built in silos, but not on purpose. Different programs require different point solutions. MSK benefits live over here and mental health benefits live over there. Employees are expected to navigate between them on their own, often without any system that recognizes the connection between the two.
This fragmented architecture is inconvenient and expensive. Dollars spent treating chronic pain in isolation are incomplete, because almost two thirds of the time, they’re only addressing half the problem. A truly integrated benefits architecture doesn’t just connect MSK and mental health support. It analyzes utilization patterns to flag members trending toward high-cost, complex claims and routes them to coordinated care proactively.
When the mental health side of the equation goes untreated, it drives greater absenteeism and, eventually, long-term disability claims. Similarly, mental health investments that don’t account for physical pain are leaving those outcomes on the table as well.
Truly integrated care has become the standard. It’s no longer just a “nice to have.” Benefits leaders who are serious about mental health can no longer afford to treat physical and emotional wellbeing as parallel tracks. They need to treat the whole-person: one that identifies physical pain as a leading indicator of mental health risk, routes members to coordinated support, and doesn’t require the employee to be their own care coordinator along the way.
Mental Health Awareness Month is a good time to take stock. What happens when an employee who's been managing back pain for two years that's never asked for help finally decides to seek care? What does the journey look like? How many calls do they have to make? How many dead ends will they reach before getting the help he needs?
Closing the gap between MSK and mental health doesn’t require rebuilding your entire benefits stack, but it does require intentionality. There are a few principles that define what integrated support looks like in practice:
Every May, organizations post about mental health. They share resources, maybe bring in a speaker, maybe run a Slack campaign about taking mental health days. Those efforts matter, but they don’t change the structural reality that most benefits architectures are set up to miss the mental health needs of people in physical pain, and to frustrate the employees who finally gather the courage to ask for help.
This Mental Health Awareness Month, the opportunity isn’t just to amplify awareness. It’s to look honestly at whether your benefits can deliver on what awareness promises.
An integrated benefits operating system does exactly this. It identifies and anticipates risk signals across physical and mental health, steering members toward the right resources, and giving benefits leaders the population-level visibility to get ahead of claims before they land.
The connection between chronic pain and mental health is clear. The willingness to ask for help — even among the groups that have historically stayed quiet — is growing. The question is whether your benefits are ready to meet them.
Interested in the full picture? Our latest report, The 2027 Renewal Crisis: Predictive Insights to Build Better Benefits Strategies covers mental health trends, MSK utilization, chronic condition prevalence, preventive care gaps, and more.