Mental illness now costs the global economy trillions. At Davos 2026, experts discuss how disruption and identity shifts are reshaping wellbeing.
At Davos 2026, leaders framed mental health as a systemic risk amplified by disruption, isolation, and technology that was “never designed with mental health in mind.” Moderator Helen Clark linked post-Covid loneliness, eco-anxiety, and rising youth vulnerability, noting suicide as “the second leading cause of death” from ages 10–24. Business leader Stanley Bergman argued mental illness must be treated like any other condition: “We have to be ready to recognise that it is an illness. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.” He warned against AI replacing human care, emphasizing how simple empathy changes outcomes: “A nurse held my hand and said, it’ll be fine. That changed everything.”
Safe Online’s Marija Manojlovic described an accelerating “attachment economy,” where children spend 6–9 hours online daily while platforms optimize engagement without measuring mental-health impact. She cited online sexual abuse at massive scale and urged moving beyond “safety by design” to “wellbeing by design,” with incentives for prosocial outcomes. NYU President Linda Mills outlined a shift from crisis response to a public-health model: leadership normalization, 24/7 human support, peer programs, and resilience-building. The call to action: measure outcomes (“What you don’t measure, you cannot change”), reduce stigma, and align regulation and business models with human wellbeing.
Good morning everybody. Doesn't a minute's silence feel a long time? So I'm Helen Clark and I'm your moderator. And just so thrilled to see a packed room on the very last morning of Davos to discuss mental health issues. And it's fantastic. The forum's provided a platform for this incredibly important topic, because I think we're all aware that the turbulent times we live in are taking their toll on mental health and wellbeing, and we have people on the panel very well placed to discuss this. When I said to Stanley, how do I describe you? He said, I'm the business guy, but business has got a big interest in good mental health of of its employees. Its staff are next to Stanley Bergman as Maria Manolakos, who is the executive director of Safe Online USA, focusing on digital safety for children. A huge issue as we know. And then we have Linda mills, president of New York University, who herself has a background, academic background as a professor in the social work area and also in law, and has has focused on, on trauma. If I think back to my own experience, I was a minister of health a very long time ago, in the late 1980s in New Zealand. And my job at that time was to close down the major institutions that people spent years and years of their life in and move people to community based care. And that can be done well or done badly, as we know, because in the community you need you need support. But the issues have changed so much since then with the pressures on people. We think of young people during Covid, the isolation that that brought, which had a significant impact on health and wellbeing. Loneliness soared as an issue and loneliness in general appears to be quite a significant factor in driving rising rates of dementia in society. And now we have eco anxiety, young people also showing a lot of anxiety about what's happening to our climate ecosystem. So there's a lot of pressures out there and we want to get into them. I'm going to have some sort of, you know, sort of framing positioning first from our panelists, but then we want to get into solutions because we're all solution focused. When we come here to the, to the Weaf. So, Stanley, if I come to you first and you and I are probably more the laypeople on on this panel, but from your business leadership perspective, how are you yourself seeing the conversation around mental health and wellbeing changing? So.
Helen, first of all, a huge part of the US GDP is spent on health care. It's about 18% of that. About two thirds is related to the non-communicable diseases pulmonary, cardiac, cancer, diabetes and two other ones. One is dental because good oral care means good health. That's the world I come from and then the mental health area. So dental and mental health, we work together a lot because we're not viewed as the big four, but we're very relevant. That's number one. Number two, since Covid or with the onslaught of Covid, we've had this isolation in the workforce. What we do know is over 90% of workers, at least I'm talking about in the United States in one way or another, are impacted by mental health, whether it's directly in their family or a friend or a friend's family. And this is leading to real tension, driven by working from home. Because working from home means you're in isolation. And so from a business point of view, the impact on productivity is significant. That's my business hat. But from a human point of view, I think the impact on all of us is huge. You'll hear from the experts in a minute. I'm not an expert on mental health, but what I think in my message today to business leaders, leaders of institutions is be on the lookout for what's going on in your own organisation. It's too late when the people that work for you or your families show up in the clinical setting, yes, things can be done. We have to be on the lookout in advance. We have to be on the lookout for action at home, for action amongst our team. Things that indicate that there's some form of mental illness, and we have to be ready to recognise that it is an illness. There's nothing to be ashamed of. It's an if you have a cardiac issue, you're not ashamed of it. If you have a mental issue, there may be a stigma. We have to get rid of that. As business leaders. I will leave it to the experts to go into detail on how you can identify this.
Thank you Stanley, and you brought up such important issues about the working in isolation and also the stigma that people often feel, and that leads to a reluctance to come forward and ask for the support you may need. Maria, coming to children and digital systems, these systems were never designed with mental health in mind. Right. But have profound consequences for it. Your turn.
I first want to turn to the audience. How are you feeling today? It's the last day, right? Yeah. You know, take a deep breath. We're here. We made it through this week. It was probably overwhelming. But I maybe want to ask you to raise your hand of those of you who feel optimistic and hopeful about the future. Okay, that's a good ratio. I like that, okay. That gives me hope as well. Because I we've heard a lot we've heard a lot this week. And I think one of the things that I, have been thinking mostly about has been, the announcements around, you know, humanoid robots, replacement of human force, AI penetrating every aspect of our lives, people being worried, including the CEOs of the very companies who are making the big chatbots. Chatbot AI, AI is an LMS saying that the biggest concern that they have is not about labour markets or energy markets and things like that. It is how will we redefine what it means to be a human? What is the meaning and the purpose of humans in the age of AI? And that's very worrying to me, because I don't feel that none of these companies have actually measures or thoughts about monitoring how their businesses, their models impacting mental health and wellbeing of of humans more broadly. I've been working in the space of child online protection and safety for ten years now, and what we have seen, in terms of the impacts of digital technologies on mental health and wellbeing of young people, is that humans tend to minimise and normalise things that are happening in the online world because they are happening in the online world, they're not in the physical realm. While the harms and impacts on the mental health, on the wellbeing, health more broadly, interactions and life outcomes is as severe or if not more, when it comes to the digital digital world, I will give you a trigger warning because things that I talk about mostly also relate about relate to sexual exploitation and abuse of children in the online ecosystem, but also then other types of harms that are associated to it and more broadly, mental health related issues. Just kind of to set the scene annually, 300 million children are reported to be sexually abused in the digital ecosystem. That means that they're being extorted, shared explicit images, images of children being raped and abused are being shared across the open and the dark web. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is just about those cases that we know about. But there is so much more happening. We are seeing a huge growth in the deepfakes of sexualized images of children being produced by generative AI models. And this is not only people always say like, well, is it that harmful if it's not a real child, but it is because it normalizes sexual abuse of children, but it also creates an overwhelm of the system that is already overwhelmed in terms of investigating these cases, trying to find the actual victims. So you will have law enforcement capacity being spread across, trying to identify victims that potentially do not exist. Then add on top of that kind of the enabling kind of system where you have kids and Gen Z and teens spending between 6 and 9 hours daily online. In that ecosystem, you are having social interactions that are not synchronous or asynchronous social interactions. In that sense, you are then seeing the emergence of issues such as loneliness, isolation, which again creates a fertile ground for every other possible negative mental health outcome or potential abuse and vulnerabilities of of of of children going more broadly. But we know in terms of the young people and mental health, is that 1 in 7, 10 to 19 year olds globally has a mental health condition. Most of the mental health conditions, 50% of mental health conditions appear by the age of 18, which gives us gives us just a sense of how relevant it will be to actually look into kids particularly, and then add on top of that the AI, what AI is now doing to our kids, especially these general purpose conversational chatbots, is that they are creating intimacy and intimacy and companion attachments between kids and machines. And this is not something that ever existed before. Before the models of social media companies were attachment economy, attention economy. They were trying to grab your attention, which was already psychologically powerful enough. Now we are moving from attention economy to attachment economy, which creates even more profound links between the humans using these models and the actual actual business models of the companies. The reason why we are worried is because children are seen mostly by businesses as resources. Children's are the early adopters of technologies. And these extractive models, they need data, actually want to engage children as early as possible to be able to use that data for the development of further improvement of their models and engagement around profit, obviously. So what I want to kind of wrap us up is that the conditions in which we are operating is that there is an arms race to create AI models and deploy them across the spectrum of human endeavor. Children are their collateral damage because they're not being seen as genuine, genuine humans. They're being seen as a resource. But also these systems are not being built with safety in mind. So we really need to think about how do we build business models that have wellbeing and safety at the core of the businesses, rather than as an afterthought, as it has been the case so far? And I will just close off by saying that again, going back to normalization and underestimating the impact of these harms, social interactions, whether they're online or offline, are not there just for fun. Social media AI systems are not just there for fun. These interactions shape what it means to be a human, and our children currently do not have good models to follow.
Well, some profoundly disturbing thoughts in that. And we need to come back to the the what to do question as when we've had the first interventions. But what you're describing is, in effect, children being groomed in a certain way. And that's Yeah, very concerning. Right. So we're going to move from that concern to the set of concerns. I'm sure Linda will inform us on. Yeah. So I mean, you see people suffering all sorts of forms of disconnection, isolation. And so bring it bring you in to tell us.
So Stan and Maria have touched on a number of issues that are related to college mental health. But and that's going to be my focus. But why I'm so impressed that so many of you are here. Is that the first step? And Stan mentioned this as well, is for us to recognize the stigma associated with mental health, because until we recognize that it isn't okay to get help or to ask for help, or to describe what's going on inside, that if it isn't okay to do that, that people won't come forward and and ask for help. So suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people from now the age of ten years old to 24, that has gotten increasingly worse over time. And Covid was a huge contributor. So the first step, of course, is that if people are that vulnerable, then the question is, how do we get their attention so that they feel strong enough to ask for help, because that's the only way you're going to prevent it. And in fact, it is preventable, complicated, difficult, challenging. But if people come forward and ask for help, we can take steps to support them. And we can talk a little bit about what some of those solutions are. 50% of people who are in that level of distress don't come forward to ask for help. So that is the key that unlocks the door to addressing this issue. And the reason why I'm so excited that all of you are in this audience and it's such a large audience, is it starts to acknowledge that mental health is a serious issue that all of us need to address and take into account in each of our various industries, whether it's not for profits, whether it's Stan in business, we have got to recognize that we can actually build in supports so that people can start to feel and experience the resilience that they need in order to confront whatever it is that makes them suicidal in the first place.
Yes. Well, coming from New Zealand, the capital of youth suicide in the OECD, I completely relate to what you say. And it's, it's defied solutions, remedies for, for many years. So I'm all ears when we come to the second stage of now of, of, of this discussion. Stanley listening to it, what thoughts does it provoke for you on how, in the business world there might be a response to the challenges?
Well, let me give you a math answer, and then let me give you a human answer. From the math, the NCDs are the non-communicable diseases that are totally preventable. Preventable. So if we put our minds to it, we can bring down the cost, the number of mental health cases that's important to society, important to business. And let me talk about the human side. I think this AI whole concept is very dangerous, because it takes the human touch out of so much that is involved, at least from the healthcare point of view. And that's my business, the whole area of touch. So I'm a skier. I've had four, four accidents and four operations. I was mortified. My wife's a physician and she told me not to worry, but I was mortified when I had to have my first back operation, and I was sitting in that ready to go in for the operation, and a nurse held my hand and said, it'll be fine. That changed everything. When I woke up, I was in a different state of mind.
Yeah.
When I'm worried about is this AI stuff? Yes. If doctors uses a tool, maybe when you go in to see a doctor, they'll it'll be recorded into the machine and they'll look at you more, so that's great. But I think we have to be very, very alert. And we have to make sure that when we interact with our healthcare practitioners, that we talk to them, that at medical school, Linda, you run one of the biggest medical schools in the US that healthcare practitioners are spoken to and encouraged to bring that human touch into healthcare, because if we don't do that, I'm very worried about where this AI is going. If AI is a tool, it's fine, but if it's a substitute for the human touch. I'm worried.
But even the physician consultation now is more likely to be on the phone. Right. That's at least if it's a smartphone you can connect in some way. But there's a lot of distance being put in these relationships very seriously.
Just build quickly. It's so amazing that you bring this up because I was at a panel yesterday, with Crisis Text Line. Yes. They're one of the largest global organizations that provide advice in crisis situations. And they are struggling because the funding now is going away from helplines that operate based on a human model. So they have human volunteers who are providing advice and support towards AI because they're more optimized. But there's another thing which I'm again, how is our sense of social interaction changing is impacted by AI? Is that a lot of the helplines, because they are overwhelmed by the need, by the amount of people who need their help, are deploying some form of AI in the triaging process. But when you call now or when you try to chat to them, they will ask, do you want to chat to the right, to the real human, or to AI? People opt for for AI because they find it easier or more detached, whatever it is. I mean, there's.
The stigma issue.
The stigma issue. Yeah.
So there's a distance in terms of the relationship. And then you feel as though, okay, nobody knows. Nobody's still nobody's going to know. So that's.
But there is also this amazing research that they brought up I think it was from Norway, but now they are doing it also in the global South, where they're trying to prove the the, the investment in the economic model of actually working with real human volunteers for the societies and volunteers themselves. The volunteers are reporting so much more higher levels of beneficial mental health outcomes, but also communities are having economic benefit from it because cohesion in the communities is rising. And again, we are losing a lot of that because we are just looking into the efficiencies and performance and not the human aspect of what we are trying to do in terms of mental health.
The mind boggles, doesn't it? You ring the helpline, press one of your considering suicide, press two of you considering self-harm. I mean, it's a horrifying thought, but it optimises in some way. So coming back to the issues you raised, Maria and the what to do question, This is an area it's notoriously difficult to regulate in. So to what extent do the answers lie down that path? To what extent do the answers lie in how we bring up children in our education system? What sort of messaging? You know, we've talked over many years about how to ensure that children can become more more media literate, more so is there something at that end of it as well? What's the mix of answers that you're looking at?
It's a very complex ecosystem, but I'll try to kind of focus on things that I think we can do in the immediate term. It's very easy to look at all these harms and feel overwhelmed. It it is so easy to think about missing this information abuse online, mental health issues and all these kinds of things, and then try to address the violent extremism, anti-Semitism, all these kinds of things. It is easy to look at these and then really have a laser focus on them. But I think we're missing the bigger picture, because these manifestations of harms normally have more or less common kind of causalities or common common maybe mechanism which exacerbate these harms. I don't want to say they cause them necessarily, but they definitely exacerbate them. So a lot of the fight in this, this, this sphere in my ecosystem has been to introduce safety by design as a business principle for majority of the tech companies. And we were so focused on safety by design that we've set our bar very low. We set our bar for us, for societies and for tech companies just don't do really terrible harm. Like that is like, please just don't do that. But everything else is fine. But we didn't think about are we actually asking them to have measures related to mental health outcomes, to the wellbeing outcomes, to how is your business causing prosocial effects and interactions rather than just safety by design? So what I've come to do now is I say safety by design should be your initial entry point step that is a floor, not a ceiling. And then on top of that we should be asking. We should be asking measures around impacts on mental health, on well-being. So what we started speaking about this year is wellbeing by design, especially for children. Maybe for adults you cannot go to that step. But for children, you ask of other businesses not only to prove that you're not going to get their child to commit a suicide, but you're asking them to prove what is the actual beneficial. Will they try and learn to learn to play a piano? Will they learn to develop cognitive skills, will learn to be more social, you know, create kindness and stuff like that. And we don't ask that from companies who are serving products to our kids that they are using 6 to 9 hours a day. And that to me is mind boggling, because if you get a playground set up in your city where 20% of kids are harmed daily fracture, arms, break, teeth, get abused by adults on the playground, every city will shut them down in a minute. But because it's online again, somehow it's like, oh, it's beneficial for some. So like we can't really change it. But up to 20% of kids get worst of the harms. So I think flipping the models and creating business incentives for these type of things, actually creating competition, mechanisms so they can compete on safety and wellbeing and prosocial effects rather than just not doing the worst forms of harm.
And in in your work, how receptive are businesses to this kind of messaging?
I think that the things are changing. Regulation is unfortunately now focusing only on safety as a basic principle. So there's a there has been a really good movement in terms of regulation. What I would say is that, we just need to also start thinking about not only what we should have regulated 20 years ago and now focus on that which is social media, but be really forward looking in ten years from now. This is what we anticipate in terms of impacts. Can we now now act so those impacts are not realized. So again have that forward look. And I think communities, parents particularly mothers particularly have been a really strong voice customers as well, but also governments that are really having pressures from voters that this is becoming a very salient political issue as well across the spectrum. So kind of a bipartisan, which is a really good movement.
Linda, you, also spoke from the hat of someone very concerned with the students mental health, college, mental health. Where would you like to see? I mean, you've got your own approaches and solutions and would you would you be able to also generalize from those to what society could do?
Yeah. Early on, when we addressed this issue in 2004 at NYU, we really took a crisis, approach, which was to be sure that those, those most in need would get the services that they needed. And so we created a 24 over seven hotline. We've now, over those 20 years, received a million calls. We use a text line that is human, not AI generated and in six languages so that people could use their own language, even though the primary language, obviously at NYU is in English. So we did we set up a number of mechanisms to ensure that the crisis piece of this was addressed. And in the process, with all of those calls coming in and all of those texts, we've we've counted that we've saved about 5000 lives so that people have actually used it. So that's the crisis piece of it. But slowly but surely, over the course of those years, as we developed our expertise in addressing it as a crisis, it became obvious that we weren't dealing with the stigma piece and that 50% of people weren't going to come in, and they weren't even going to call the hotline, even though they could call it anonymously. Their parents could call their roommates, could call their friends could call anybody could call and say, I'm worried about somebody. So we realized that we really needed much more of a public health model where everybody was involved, just like this amazing room of people. Everybody was involved in addressing the issue of mental health. We were all going to be concerned about it, and all of us were going to recognize that we each have an aspect that we own around mental health, including our own. And what the evidence shows is, for example, leadership talking about mental health and ways in which they take care of themselves from a nature walk to a craft to putting their phone away while they're preparing for class, whatever version it is. But leadership articulating the importance of mental health is really, really important. And so everybody in this room has an opportunity to actually confront and address the issue of stigma, because each of you in your own spheres play leadership roles. So I think those are a few of the mechanisms that we've developed. But what's key here is it's just taking out the fact that mental health is somehow exceptional. It is central to our very beings.
So moving from the crisis approach to more one based on prevention being more open about it, involving more people in the conversation, coming up with ways of dealing with, with stress and and so on. Yeah, right. Well this audience has come in and great numbers. And we're going to give you a chance now to articulate any, any questions you've got on your mind as you listen to the, the panel discussion. So I'm going to look for for hands up, as it were. And who would like to come in first? Yes, at the back.
Michael Hengartner, thank you very much. Australia has decided to forbid social, online activities for young people. As an expert, what's your opinion on that? Is that something other countries should follow? Are there any negative side effects to the to this decision, or is it in your view going to be mostly positive thing?
It is hard to say at this point in time. I would say that the Australia's move is just the proof of what happens when you don't respond as a business owner to the cries of people who have been asking for better protections and better safety. At some point, Australia has decided, well, this is not good enough anymore. We will just stop it. I think. I don't expect any major negative impacts. Will it be hard for the generation of kids who up to this point have been online 6 to 9 hours? Yes. And I think there was a really good, Julian Grant, who is the safety commissioner in Australia, and their team have been working in lead up to this regulation to actually create support networks and create kind of guidance for parents, for kids on how to overcome these withdrawal symptoms, because kids will have them and go back to having different ways of communicating. However, I will say the shortfalls of this regulation are that it took us way too long to get to a place to define even what social media is. So what they have regulated are specific platforms, but kids are now moving to AI chatbots because they're not part of the regulation.
Yeah.
So basically what you've done is now more of them are going to be using GPT and other things rather than social media. And again, that's what I'm saying. Regulate for the future, not for the past.
It's really the genie's out of the bottle. Right. And the children are adept at using the internet and platforms, so they may well find another way effectiveness of it will be.
Let me say one thing about the college context. If that's okay, not not going in the Australia route, but, we have Jonathan Hite in our campus. Stern professor, obviously the anxious generation who's written a great deal about this, and we are working very closely to create the right conditions in college for how students use the internet and every form of AI. So this becomes a crucial issue. It can't be that we're going to regulate in a way that means that students will do, you know, have no access. But we're in conversation now with faculty and staff around when is it appropriate, and then how do we do and create in real life activities so that students understand that this is a moment where you put your phone away, and when the research shows that when you put your phone away while you're studying, you do better as a result. So there are a number of outcomes that are clear that once articulated, particularly to those who are in this developmental stage of college, that this is an opportunity for them to change the way in which they actually live their lives.
Just something I think, Helen, you will appreciate this as well. What I also want to put in front of you is something that you will not hear often in this context, which is we don't talk enough about the Global South context when it comes to digital and mental health. We talk about a global north, and this is like we we feel very privileged to be talking about the off ramps, the third places. How do you actually create conditions for people to connect back to be more disconnected within the global South? The major discourse is how do you connect as many kids as possible and give them devices, one device per child. And a lot of these programs are doing exactly that. And these are the places where adoption of AI in education, health and other places will be the fastest because of the lack of regulation and the barrier to markets and stuff like that. And I think we need to also think about this equity issue that is now appearing between those who can be privileged to disconnect and those who actually will not be.
Very good point. Can I just Stanley.
I don't know whether it's right or wrong what was done in Australia, but what I do know is that this topic is now on the agenda. And it's the same agenda, the same methodology that got limits to age, age restrictions for drinking or firearms or things like that. So we got this on the agenda, whether it's right or wrong, I don't know. But the debate is on and that's what's important with this Australian move.
Very good. Thank you. Yes. At the back.
I Jeff Richards Foundation. So as parents we can monitor what the children do. We have blocks to block them. But the kids are cleverer than us on these. They can work out the hacks. The companies know the hacks. They don't care about them because it's against their business. They want the kids to go through the hacks. So either this should be regulatory. To deal with this, the companies get massive fines for not fixing the hacks because it all comes up from parents immediately on the support lines. The kids can get through through the time zones. You wake up in the morning and you see the kids 6:00 in the morning before they go to school, and you see they've been on seven hours because they've been in a different time zone. This is one way, but there's also one of the young global leaders here the other day has this system that he's showing around brick, where you tap the phone and everything's out immediately. Unfortunately, my my kid won't allow me anywhere near her phone because she knows what this is. But how do we how do we deal with this to actually stop this regulatory to the companies, find them big time because they really know these hacks are there and they can fix them easily, but they won't.
I will just recognize yesterday I had a session with with with John Hight and Doctor Becky. I know many people know her from from her work across across the world, and we were really focusing on the overwhelm and the anxiety that parents feel in this digital age because they feel powerless. And I will say to these parents, it is not your responsibility to be the sole monitor of how this. We do need to work with companies to create, safety and wellbeing measures that can prevent kids from getting harmed. So it's not all all on the shoulders of parents. In the meantime, what we talk about is that children need friction in their growing up. They need to be risk takers. And currently we are trying to kind of reduce everything that we can around them to create conditions for for them to be as, as, as protected as they can be. But I think what what will be helpful is setting healthy boundaries early on. So then what Becky was saying. So then when the teenagers come and you say no social media or no phones, they're not freaking out. Like, what do you mean no social media, no phones? So setting healthy boundaries from early childhood will help you be able to then talk through them with the what the boundaries are, but at the same time being open to their online experiences. Because if you close the door, if you come to this conversation judgmental, if you don't create space where they can feel safe to share good and the bad, they will never tell you what happened. And I normally say yes, and I normally say don't wait for the don't wait for don't say If this happens when something bad happens, because something bad will surely happen and hopefully something minor. But so they know that they can be with you, they can share that with you and be open to those things. It's really important in the in the short term, while we sort out the company angle. The industry angle.
Yeah, right. Looking around the room again, I mean, bringing up children as challenging even before these pressures. Right. What can we do to help parents, to, to support their children through navigating this age?
Yeah. It's hard. It is really hard. And I think, again, there is a policy angle. There is a service angle. There is industry angle. Again, parents cannot be left alone to manage this. It is not something that they can in fact manage.
I would also say that in general, companies, for example, that are affiliated with the World Economic Forum are really socially responsible companies. And I think discussions like this educate CEOs, business leaders on the importance of this issue. So I wouldn't blame companies 100%. Yes, there are bad companies, there are good people, there are bad people, there are good companies, bad companies. But majority of companies, big companies are socially responsible. And their leadership would like to learn more about this. And therefore I would ensure, you know, the World Economic Forum, NYU, you have you do a lot of public private partnership work. And I think I'm more optimistic about companies understanding this issue in the long run and addressing it than saying, you know, the companies are just out to make money. It's a balance.
Yes. So much of this is educating people and and panels like this raising awareness about the impact of, of of what's going on and then advocating. And the forum is a perfect place for that.
And maybe I can add just we were in preparation. So this week we've launched this initiative called weave Well-Being, into the fabric of technology. We are creating another, collaborative funding vehicle to support the field. To generate enough evidence, look into the beneficial tech solutions that we can use, but also scale interventions across governments. And I will just say, to prepare for that launch, we've done a landscaping landscaping report to understand what is the state of science and evidence, what is the state of policies currently on these issues, and how can we then build from there on. And one of the main findings is that we don't have the evidence is so fragmented, especially on the side of rigorous scientific research, that we did not think about this 20 years ago to create baselines for longitudinal pieces of research that can help us then create measures to monitor what is happening with our mental health and young people. So now we are trying to appeal and raise the funding for generating this basis for science. So we're working with the World Health Organization, with the Lancet Commission, with the others to really start thinking about where does the human science on this issue need to be right now, so we can be better to prove or to be able to inform companies and give them the sense of what is actually happening. In that sense, my big plea is we need to advocate and create either pressures or through conversations or through capacity development to create mental health outcomes to be measured as part of the policy evaluations of governments, but also companies. What you don't measure, you cannot change. But you can also argue for and currently we don't have those measures in transparency reports, in the reports of governments around the policies in Australia and so on. Although they have now created an evaluation they're going to be doing of this policy particularly. But we need to focus on creating conditions in which we can actually have dialogue, but also have data based dialogue and evidence for what we want to do and how we want to achieve it.
Down the back.
We just discussed a little bit on how you could support parents, but just to take that one step further, a lot of us are in business, so how can we support business and the people who are leading teams to help support their team and build resilience within the team?
Stanley, that's for you. I think.
To me it all begins with this discussion. You know, I don't know, perhaps you can figure out the date, but I think it was about 15 years ago. I was on a panel like this with, secretary general of the late Kofi Annan, and we were dealing with emergency preparedness. And I turned to him and I said, you call business will come. Maria, I don't want to put pressure on you, but if the mental health community reaches out to business, business will come. We just don't know that. Will the issues you're involved with and I would say the same to you, Linda, through your academic institutions, call us in the business. People will come.
I mean, students are transitioning obviously into business as they graduate from colleges and they that support, particularly in a post-Covid moment. We haven't talked about Covid, the influence of Covid, why people are so attached to their devices, what happened as a result, the high levels of loneliness. I mean, it is staggering what happened as a result, an entire generation affected by their isolation and their inability and now they're making up for it. And so there are so many opportunities for us to work together to understand how, through walking through this pipeline at the college level and then as they enter the the life of their life of work and all that, that means. And so we have collected a huge amount of data during these 4 or 6 years that students are going through the college process, and then we kind of hand them off. We have so much information about how you can build in mechanisms of resilience for students as they transition into their work lives.
That's amazing.
And we need to come together and have that conversation so that those students, those graduates can be successful now in their life, in their work.
Yes.
So we were in the business in Kuwait with. Thank you. My name is Bahia Jaafar. I come from Kuwait. We run a business. And I just want to share what we've done. Recently we have around 2000 employees. And, what we've done is run a happiness survey within the whole enterprise. And part of this happiness survey had some of the health, outcomes. Sorry. Yeah. And we were overwhelmed with the results. We have not shared that, but maybe a way forward.
Overwhelmed. Why don't you describe, just for a moment, what what you found?
Actually, 65% of our employees were very happy and showed no signs of, any mental issues. Some of them had some fear of AI entering into the business and taking away their, their jobs. But overall, it was our first time and we will be running this on yearly basis. I'm trying to, you know, assist the gentleman who asked about the business, question. And we're hoping to build up every year more information. And, so we have a doctor on site for 24 hours. So, this is just a contribution. I have no further questions.
Really helpful if you don't have to. Maria's point, if you do not have data and you don't know what you're dealing with, you can't address it. You can't develop the systems that will actually help to support people through their working lives. I mean, it will make all the difference. Knowledge is power.
And then to add to that, that is, you need to have a purposeful approach, a clear idea of what you want to achieve and also investment that costs money. And we never get to speak about the cost of actually doing all of these things when as a collaborative funding vehicle, we are really trying to raise the funds, but it is really hard to raise the funds for these issues because it's not on the top of people's agenda. So and it costs enormous amounts of money for companies, for trust and safety teams within companies for, for, for, for all of you. So there is there is cost.
And I'm going to add it contributes to productivity. Yes. Right. And so and that's.
Not only a cost.
Exactly.
So we run a pulse survey in our business every year. And one of the highest rated agenda items that comes up is social responsibility engagement.
Yeah.
People can get involved in helping others. And I think that drives up morale and also indirectly deals with mental illness, loneliness.
Yeah. Incredibly helpful.
Well I mean we've we've really I think had a good airing of the issues and we've also had insights into what we can do, the leadership positions that all of us have with respect to our organisations, companies, university, whatever it is we've, we've talked about, you know, is this scope for regulation, is this scope for this kind of discussion with business, which alerts people to the issues, raises the issues. And you're right, Stanley, often this starts here at the forum. And over the years it gets traction and you get some some real movement. We've heard about the call for for more evidence. I think the use of the staff surveys is obviously very constructive. I mean, it's probably most most organisations will do a staff survey. So having a conscious focus on these issues so that that they can be addressed is very, very important. Can I ask the panel any last point you really want to make to to impress the audience on on this.
I'm going to say a couple of things. I want to speak to the volunteer issue, because businesses can organise those kinds of events that can be incredibly effective. So we worked with an organisation called Afya last year that sends supplies all over the world and students, hundreds of students came in to, to to participate, and it was very effective. And those sorts of events actually raise people's, sense of resilience. So I'd say that I'd say there are a number of programs we use one called Radical Health, where with just four modules, you bring people in and it helps again around resilience, literally four modules. It's peer run so that nobody feels as though people are looking at them and somehow their stigma is going to get triggered. So really, really amazing, outcomes in terms of bringing people in and giving them an opportunity to understand what actually is to, to to appreciate what's going on with them and then to gain a few skills around resilience and coping. So I'd say those are two of them. Don't forget nature going out and taking a walk, just encouraging people to take a 15 minute break. Amazing outcome.
Fantastic. Stanley, your 20s.
Call business. Call business will come.
Right? That was ten. That's great. Maria.
Well-Being by design. This is not. Let's just flip the narrative. We need to focus on wellbeing and be inclusive and participatory. Lived experience is critical for these debates because the worst products are developed when people who are alike sit together and come up with a great idea, and then the impacts on marginalised groups, people who are vulnerable are just tremendously harmful. So be participatory wellbeing by design.
And what better place to say go outside for 15 minutes on a fine day at Davos. Thank you everybody. Thank you.
I gave you my card.