Beyond Awareness: MHS Chief Science Officer Jenni Pitkanen on Mental Health
Mental health support is often framed around the resources available to people, but thoughtful, sustainable support also depends on the environments we foster, how we respond when people reach out, and the respect and understanding we show for different lived experiences.
This World Mental Health Day, the theme Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change highlights the importance of listening to people with lived experience of mental health conditions and recognizing their knowledge as a form of expertise that can inform what happens next.
At MHS, that means developing trusted, evidence-based insights that help individuals, families, professionals, and organizations move from understanding to real action. In this conversation, MHS Chief Science Officer Jenni Pitkanen examines mental health through a workplace lens, exploring how leaders can create environments where people feel safe speaking openly, and why mental health must be embedded into how organizations operate. She also discusses how trusted assessment can turn insight into timely, actionable, and personalized support across workplace, clinical, educational, and community settings.
Mental health is often discussed as an individual responsibility, but organizations play a significant role. From your perspective, what are some of the most important ways leaders and organizations can create environments where people feel comfortable being open about their mental health experiences and are able to thrive?
JENNI: Whether people feel comfortable being open is often decided in ordinary moments: delivering a difficult update without bracing for blame, acknowledging when something didn’t work, or raising a concern with confidence that it will be taken seriously. That sense of safety matters when someone is struggling with their mental health, too. They should be able to ask for support without having to share more than they choose.
Creating that environment is about conditions rather than campaigns. When we asked our teams what they need to do their best work, they named time and cognitive space to think, clear direction paired with autonomy, and psychological safety. Those are shaped by leadership choices around workload, clarity, and how decisions get made. Closing the loop matters just as much. Openness that produces no change teaches people that speaking up costs something and returns nothing.
Managers are another important part of that environment. A global study by The Workforce Institute at UKG found that managers have as much impact on employees’ mental health as their spouses or partners, while 60% of employees worldwide said their job is the single biggest factor influencing their mental health.1 Leadership capability is part of an organization’s mental health infrastructure. It can be measured and developed, and it is within an organization’s control.
Throughout your career in behavioral health and leadership development, how has the conversation around mental health evolved, and what progress would you still like to see in workplaces and communities?
JENNI: The biggest change is that we’re talking openly about mental health. Earlier in my career, mental health at work was something people managed privately and hoped nobody noticed. Today, it’s on the agenda, it’s funded, and organizations recognize they have a responsibility to support it.
What has moved more slowly is what happens when someone reaches out. We’ve become good at recognizing need, but we’re still slow to respond in ways that are timely and useful. When someone asks for help, what often follows is a referral, a waitlist, or a list of resources rather than support that fits their situation and arrives when it can make a difference.
The most encouraging shift is happening in the science itself. There is a growing understanding that people change over time rather than remain fixed in a category. How someone is functioning and what they say about their quality of life should be treated as central, not supplementary. That’s the field catching up to something practitioners and families have always known: a person is not a category.
What I want to see next is a much smaller gap between recognizing a need and doing something useful about it.
World Mental Health Day encourages us to think about well-being on a larger scale. What is a misconception about mental health that you think is holding organizations back from providing necessary supports?
JENNI: A common misconception is that mental health is something an organization provides rather than something it produces.
Organizations often think of support as resources placed alongside the work: a benefit, a training module, an awareness week. Those things matter, but the daily experience of work also shapes people’s mental health, including how work is designed, decisions are made, people are led, and concerns are resolved. If those conditions are wearing people down, programming alone cannot offset them.
Another misconception is that measurement automatically leads to better support. There’s a lot of promising work happening in this space, but measurement is only useful if it accurately detects what it claims to detect. Measuring the wrong thing can have real consequences. Someone who is struggling could be told they’re fine or directed toward something that doesn’t fit their situation. A poor measure can close a door that was difficult for that person to open in the first place.
A measure earns trust by demonstrating that it is accurate, consistent, and appropriate for the people who will take it. That takes rigorous research and a willingness to revisit the work when the evidence doesn’t hold up. That’s the standard we hold ourselves to because these tools can inform real decisions about a person’s care, education, or opportunities.
Mental health cannot simply be bought as a program; it has to be built into how an organization works. The tools we use must be good enough to earn people’s trust.
As Chief Science Officer, you help shape the tools MHS brings to the market. What role do you believe assessments and evidence-based insights can play in advancing conversations around mental health and helping people better understand themselves and others?
JENNI: There’s an analogy we use internally that captures the whole challenge. You can look at a plant and say, “This plant is dry.” That may be accurate and useful, but nothing changes. Add “water daily,” and suddenly the insight becomes actionable and drives a clear next step.
Our field has become excellent at describing where someone stands, but it’s been slower to answer the harder question: What should that person actually do next? Too often, that has been left to the clinician, teacher, manager, or individual. Closing the gap between insight and action is a large part of what my team is working on.
At its best, assessment does three things in a mental health conversation:
- It gives people language for something they may have been experiencing but couldn’t put into words.
- It replaces assumptions with evidence, allowing the conversation to move from whether something is real to what can be done about it.
- It makes change visible over time, helping people understand whether an approach is working and recognize progress that otherwise may be difficult to see.
Trust underpins all of this. We have access to more data about people than ever before, through wearables, apps, digital tools and AI. But more data doesn’t necessarily mean better insight. These signals may tell us that something has changed, but they can’t always tell us what that change means to the person experiencing it. Changes in sleep or heart rate may signal that something has changed, but they cannot tell us why. Similar signals could accompany grief, depression, or a demanding stretch at work
That’s why asking people about their experiences, or gathering insight from someone who knows them well, remains so important. A well-built assessment provides a structured way to ask the right questions, so that what someone says about their own life can meaningfully inform what happens next.
Listening to lived experience is also influencing how assessment tools are designed and improved. As MHS continues to innovate across its portfolio, including with new offerings such as Conners Comprehensive Behavior Rating Scales™ 2nd Edition (Conners CBRS® 2), what emerging mental health needs are you seeing? How should assessment tools evolve to better support individuals, families, and organizations?
JENNI: People don’t present in neat categories, and the science is catching up to that. Difficulties overlap, and the presenting concern is rarely the whole picture. Assessment tools need to look broadly and gather multiple perspectives. That is why Conners CBRS 2 draws on input from parents, teachers, and the individual taking the assessment. The research is moving toward measuring the patterns that cut across conditions rather than organizing everything around discrete diagnostic boxes, and that will reshape what we build.
A snapshot is also no longer enough. A thorough assessment at the point of diagnosis will always matter, but it needs to be complemented by lighter, more frequent check-ins that help clinicians and families understand how an individual is doing over time. That shifts assessment from something that records where a person stood to something that travels with them.
Broad assessments that shape how a child is understood and supported can also tell us more about their strengths. That’s why we built a view of strengths into Conners CBRS 2. Families need to understand not only where someone may be struggling, but also the strengths they can build on. Those strengths form the foundation of an effective support plan.
Fairness is equally important and must be built in from the beginning, not checked at the end. An assessment has to work as well for the person in front of you as it did for the people it was developed with, and establishing that takes deliberate, sustained effort: who is represented in the research, how items are written and reviewed, what gets tested and retested before anything reaches a clinician. It never really finishes, because the populations we serve keep changing.
All of this points to a shift in the purpose of assessment: delivering trusted insight when it can make a difference, grounded in science strong enough to act on. We have 40 years of that science behind us, and making it show up in people’s lives when it matters most is the work in front of us.
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References
1 The Workforce Institute at UKG. (2023). Mental health at work: Managers and money. UKG. Report
