As Men’s Mental Health Month prompts conversations about well-being, performance, and identity, a growing body of research is challenging traditional assumptions about what it means to thrive at work. At the center of that discussion are questions about how organizations recognize distress, support resilience, and create environments where people can perform sustainably over time.
For many advocates of workplace mental health, the issue is often framed as a matter of personal well-being. For Carin-Isabel Knoop, however, it began as a business problem. Her focus on mental health emerged from observing what she describes as a “mismanaged business risk” — the disconnect between human realities and organizational expectations. Many of the human realities that most influence performance remain among the least discussed in organizations. At its core, Knoop’s work asks a simple question: How can organizations become better at recognizing and discussing the human realities that most influence performance?
READ: AAPI organizes walkathon for mental health awareness (
“Our emotional and physical realities often clash with organizational imperatives,” she said, noting that traditional business education rarely prepares leaders to navigate those tensions. While many employees quietly struggle, she argues that business schools still portray “humans as robots managing robots,” despite the obvious complexities of real life. At the same time, she believes work itself can be a powerful force for well-being, providing “structure, community, meaning, and sustenance.”
Knoop is the executive director of the Case Research & Writing Group at Harvard Business School, where she and her team have helped HBS faculty develop more than 3,000 case studies in 25 years. She is also the co-author with Professor John A. Quelch of “Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace (Springer, 2018).”
The book arrived at a time when most management literature was still treating human psychology as a soft footnote to hard strategy. However, the book attracted attention from leaders in business and public health for its argument that mental health should be viewed not only as a personal issue but also as a leadership and organizational challenge, responsibility, and opportunity for positive impact.
The book’s premise was radical: managers are the de facto chief mental health officers of their teams, whether they want the role or not. It offered a science-backed framework for how leaders could take stock of their own mental states, recognize at-risk employees, reduce stigma, and support higher performance in teams and organizations. Former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala emphasized the book’s practical implications, writing: “If [managers and leaders] read this book, they will strengthen their own skills and transform their workplace and our society.”
Rather than describing her efforts as a mission, Knoop prefers a more modest goal: improving individual lives one interaction at a time. “I have never thought of myself as having a mission,” she told The American Bazaar. “If I can improve someone’s day, that is all I need. I am also driven by curiosity and by opportunities to learn from people with different experiences, expertise, and perspectives.” That philosophy has guided her work across disciplines, drawing insights from fields ranging from neuroscience and engineering to the arts. Her objective, she said, is to “make people’s lives better at work” while building bridges between different ideas, professions and communities. “I like to build bridges between people and topics,” she added.
Many of the questions Knoop explores—how organizations recognize distress, how leaders respond to vulnerability, and how people sustain performance over time—have become increasingly urgent in workplaces around the world.
More than one billion people worldwide—roughly one in seven—live with a mental health condition, according to the World Health Organization. Depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy an estimated $1 trillion in lost productivity each year. In the United States, nearly one in four adults experienced a mental health condition in the past year, yet almost half received no treatment. Many management frameworks implicitly assume people can convert effort into performance in predictable ways, even though real lives are often far more complicated.
Rethinking strength and vulnerability
Men, in particular, are often reluctant to seek support, even when experiencing significant distress. Only 26.4% of Black and Latino men ages 18 to 44 seek help for anxiety or depression, compared to 45.5% of white men.
June is Men’s Mental Health Month, and the numbers are sobering: men die by suicide at roughly four times the rate of women, while fewer than half of men experiencing anxiety or depression seek professional help. As they age, men tend to become increasingly socially isolated, with fewer close confidants than previous generations. In a 2024 essay on men’s mental health, Knoop points to Churchill’s famous description of his depression as a “black dog” as an example of a challenge that has long existed but often remains difficult to discuss openly.
READ: OpenAI to add mental health features to ChatGPT (
One recurring theme in Knoop’s work is that organizations often reward silence. Men, particularly those in leadership roles, have historically faced strong pressures to appear self-reliant and emotionally controlled.
“Workplaces tend to reward overworking and the strength of being tough,” she quotes James Kinney, then Chief People Officer at S4 Capital, in her essay. “But now we know that being vulnerable and authentic and sharing your experience of mental health is actually what we consider now to be tough. So it’s okay not to be okay.”
The problem, Knoop argues, is that cultural expectations surrounding masculinity continue to discourage emotional openness. Phrases such as “boys don’t cry” and “man up” do more than reflect attitudes—they reinforce them. Men experiencing emotional distress are often more likely to suppress it, a pattern linked to substance abuse, risk-taking and social isolation.
“Despite mainstream beliefs,” Knoop writes, “about one in three of the nearly 60 million Americans who will be diagnosed with an eating disorder in their lifetimes is male.”
Eating disorders are among the many mental health challenges that remain difficult to discuss openly, particularly among men. For Knoop, they illustrate a broader pattern: struggles that carry stigma often remain hidden until they become severe.
In a 2024 essay, “Beyond Perfect: Bodies, Barbie, and Boardrooms,” Knoop, co-writing with Bahia El Oddi, turned her lens toward perfectionism and body image — and their grip on both women and men in professional life. The essay explored how social expectations around appearance, success, and achievement can shape well-being and contribute to pressures that are often invisible to others.
“Our bodies give us credibility, choices, and often act as gatekeepers for many of life’s opportunities,” she writes, as evidenced by the so-called beauty premium — the tendency for physically attractive people to receive advantages in hiring, promotion, compensation, and social interactions.
But the piece’s sharper argument is about what chasing perfection extracts from people. “The problem with these ‘games of perfection’ is that they never end,” she writes. “We never win, but we can certainly lose — from burnout at work and persistent health problems that affect all aspects of our lives.”
Men continue to dominate business leadership, owning roughly 61% of U.S. employer businesses and holding nearly 9 in 10 Fortune 500 CEO positions. Yet despite the pressures of leadership, conversations about stress, burnout, and emotional well-being often remain stigmatized.
Knoop’s prescription for organizations is both structural and interpersonal, and it starts with the people at the top.
“When leaders admit to having struggled with and worked to address mental health issues,” Knoop writes, “employees are likelier to do so and connect differently with leaders.”
Her framework doesn’t stop at the corner office. She advocates for what she calls “micro signals” — watching for changes in behavior, affect, and routine that might indicate distress in men who will never ask for help directly. She calls for mentorship that goes beyond career ladders, for dismantling racial and ethnic disparities in mental health access and for rewriting the cultural script around what it means for men to be strong.
“We need to nurture men early on and guide them to learn that their emotions are not something that they should suppress,” she writes. “Emotions are a tool of measurement, a guide.”
Knoop continues to explore these issues across multiple platforms. In May, she and co-host Sreedhar Potarazu launched “Learning Machines,” a podcast produced in collaboration with The American Bazaar. Expanding on themes explored in their column of the same name, the podcast examines mental health, leadership and human understanding in an age increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. At first glance, mental health and AI may seem like unrelated topics. For Knoop, however, both raise the same fundamental challenge: how do we preserve human understanding, judgment, and connection in increasingly complex workplaces?
Despite growing public awareness, Knoop believes one group remains largely absent from the conversation: business leaders.
While athletes, entertainers and public figures have become increasingly open about their mental health struggles, corporate leadership has been slower to follow. “The world of business is still silent,” she said. The stigma surrounding men’s mental health, she argues, “still feels higher than for women,” reflecting enduring assumptions about masculinity, strength and leadership.
READ: ‘ChatGPT for doctors’: AI startup OpenEvidence raises $210 million to simplify medical research (July 16, 2025)
Knoop remains convinced that compassion and performance are not competing values. Organizations that ignore mental health often pay for it through burnout, disengagement and lost productivity. Those that confront it openly may discover something more valuable: healthier employees, stronger leaders and workplaces where people can thrive rather than merely endure.
In many ways, that belief sits at the heart of Knoop’s work. People are not machines, she argues, and leadership is not simply about managing performance. It is about understanding the human beings behind it.
For entrepreneurs, immigrants, and business leaders, these conversations may be especially important. Many carry the pressures of ambition, responsibility, financial uncertainty, family expectations, and cultural expectations simultaneously. Recognizing distress early—in ourselves and in others—may be one of the most important leadership skills of all.