We need EAP 2.0 and fast!

Now think about the phone number on your intranet.

I have recommended the EAP in more talks, emails and intranet pages than I could count. So this is a question for my own profession as much as anyone’s.

If a person in Ireland can now get counselling free, from the State or from a charity, what exactly is an employer paying its EAP for?

My answer isn’t “nothing”. It’s that most of us are still buying a model built for a different problem, in a different world of work. The EAP doesn’t need cancelling. It needs a version 2.0.

What has grown up around the EAP

The men’s scheme launched on 1 September 2025 with €2 million from Budget 2025. Men can get up to six free counselling sessions through MyMind with a code from their GP, or free phone counselling seven evenings a week through Connect, with no referral needed. In August, the Minister of State for Mental Health, Mary Butler, announced a further €3 million from Budget 2026 to expand community counselling.

Around that sits a lot more. Pieta offers free therapy to people in suicidal distress, people who self-harm and people bereaved by suicide. Samaritans answer any hour of any day. Text About It runs around the clock. Aware runs a free support line every day. The HSE’s Counselling in Primary Care service is free for medical card holders.

Some of that is new. Some of it has been there for years. Put together, it is a very different picture from the one most EAP contracts were first bought into.

Built for a different problem

The EAP itself is older than most of us realise. According to EAPA UK, the industry’s own professional body, EAPs grew out of occupational alcoholism programmes in the United States in the 1940s, took their modern shape in the 1970s and arrived in the UK towards the end of that decade.

The design was simple. An employee has a personal problem: drink, debt, a marriage in trouble, a bereavement. It starts to affect their work. The EAP helps that person, confidentially, so they can get back on their feet. For a great deal of what life throws at people, that model still works, and I would defend it for every one of those.

But look at the direction built into the design. EAPs were made for the problems people bring to work.

Work-related stress and burnout are problems work gives to people.

When the World Health Organization added burnout to its International Classification of Diseases in 2019, it defined it not as a medical condition but as an occupational phenomenon, resulting from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. That definition locates the problem in how work is managed, not in how well the person copes.

The Irish data points the same way. CIPD Ireland’s HR Practices in Ireland 2026 survey, run with the Kemmy Business School at the University of Limerick, found that mental health is now the leading cause of absence, cited by 51% of organisations. Asked what is driving it, they named workload (52%), a perceived lack of management support (also 52%) and an always-on culture enabled by technology (26%).

Workload. Management. Always on. None of those is something a counsellor can change, whether the State pays for the session or your employer does.

A court said as much in 2007. In Intel v Daw, a payroll analyst doing the work of two people had a breakdown after her warnings about her workload went unanswered. Intel had a confidential counselling service. Intel lost. The Court of Appeal found that a helpline could not have fixed the internal problems that created her unmanageable workload.

You can counsel someone through a bad month. You cannot counsel them out of a workload.

Why so few people ring

EAPA UK reported in October 2025 that 18.6 million UK employees were covered by an EAP, and that 623,750 contacted one during the year. That is about one covered employee in thirty. In 2024 the Irish Times reported industry estimates of 2 to 3% uptake here.

The standard response to low usage is more promotion. Another email. Another poster.

The men’s scheme tells us that men will use counselling when it is free, public and nothing to do with their employer. So I don’t think awareness is the main barrier. Is it who’s paying?

There is support for that view. Tianyi Long’s 2024 review in the Human Resource Management Journal found employees worry that using an EAP could affect their reputation and career, and that EAPs tend to align too closely with management to be fully trusted. In the same Irish Times piece, one Irish chief people officer described staff concerns that using the service could affect promotion or performance reviews.

You can promote a service people don’t trust as hard as you like. It will not change who they think it works for.

It doesn’t eat the budget. It eats the attention.

It would be easy to argue that the EAP money should go somewhere else. The numbers don’t support that. The same EAPA UK research values the UK market at about £194 million for those 18.6 million covered employees. That’s roughly £10 a head. Cancel the EAP and you free up the price of a couple of coffees per employee. That will not fund a prevention strategy.

The EAP is already bought, so when the question comes up, the answer is sitting on the shelf. It answers “what are we doing about mental health?” in one line, “we have an EAP”. It keeps the conversation on how the individual is coping, not on what the job is doing to them.

In Hatton v Sutherland in 2002, the Court of Appeal said an employer offering a confidential counselling service was unlikely to be found in breach of duty. I don’t think most organisations buy an EAP cynically. I do think that sentence still shapes how comfortable they feel once they have one.

My own profession has leaned on it too. Promoting a service is a lot easier than challenging a workload.

In fairness to the EAP

None of this is the counsellors’ fault. John McLeod’s 2010 systematic review found workplace counselling is generally effective at easing psychological problems and has a significant impact on sickness absence, though he called for more high-quality research. This research is also now 16 years old.

And a good EAP still does things the free system can’t. It is fast: more than 6,000 people were waiting for HSE counselling in April this year, and more than 1,700 of them had been waiting over six months. It covers everyone on the payroll, and often their families, for the ordinary crises of life: a separation, a bereavement, a debt, a parent who needs care. And it offers things nobody else does, such as legal and financial information, advice for a manager who doesn’t know what to say, and support for a team after a traumatic incident.

So the EAP isn’t redundant. But while the delivery has moved on, with apps, video sessions and 24-hour lines, the model hasn’t. It is still short-term, one person at a time, reached through a triage line, after the harm is done. And it says very little about what it hears.

That is the part that needs an upgrade.

What EAP 2.0 looks like

If I were designing the support layer from scratch for 2026, I would want four things the old model doesn’t give you.

Direct access, and a choice of who you see. No triage line, no call centre, no manager, no health and wellbeing manager or team in the loop. The person picks the professional, ideally in their own language, and books.

The whole person, not just counselling. Psychologists, yes, but also physiotherapists, financial coaches and career coaches. People don’t arrive with their problems sorted into neat categories, and their support shouldn’t have to be either. Why a physiotherapist? Ask anyone who has been in a desk-bound job for a number of years about pain and discomfort arising from hours of sitting and poor posture, this is workplace occupational risk that needs more attention from employers.

A feedback loop. Your EAP probably hears more about what work is doing to people than anyone else in the building. Long’s review found EAPs rarely pass employees’ concerns about working conditions back to the employer. Confidentiality is non-negotiable, but anonymised themes can be shared: what share of issues were about work, and from which parts of the organisation, where the numbers are big enough to protect people.

This year’s World Mental Health Day theme is “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change”. In most organisations, this is where the real voices are, and nobody is asking to hear them.

An example I know of the first three is Kara Connect, which has offices in Ireland and Iceland and pitches itself openly as an alternative to the traditional EAP. Instead of a phone line, employees get a “wellbeing hub”. They choose a professional from a vetted network covering more than 50 areas, from mental health and grief to relationships, finances and coaching, in more than 30 languages. In the company’s own words: “No triage, no call centres and no manager intervention needed.” The employer buys credits, and one credit is one session. The employer doesn’t see who booked, or with whom.

EAP 2.0 is a better answer to the person. We need a better answer to the job.

Where the attention should go

Show people every door. Put the EAP, Mental Health First Aiders and the free services on one page, side by side, with what each is for and how to reach it. Some people will never ring a number their employer pays for. They should still know where to go.

Hold your provider to the 2.0 standard. At your next review, ask five questions. Do you require a triage? How quickly does someone get a first session, and can they choose who they see? What happens when the sessions run out? What do you offer that the free services don’t? What other professionals are in your network? What share of the issues people brought last year were about work? And will you report that to us, anonymised, so we can act on it?

Put prevention where the Irish data says the problem is. Workload and management support top the CIPD Ireland list, and Irish law already requires employers to risk assess psychosocial hazards, the same as any other hazard. That is the subject of my next issue later this month.

Measure what matters. Not how many people rang the line, but whether work-related absence and work-related presenting issues are coming down.

The State has moved. Have we?

Keep the EAP. Upgrade it to something people will actually use, and make it tell you what it hears.

But notice what has changed around it. The State will now give a man six free counselling sessions.

An employer’s contribution can’t just be six more.

Not even six better ones.

It has to be the job.

What I’m reading this month

I’m almost finished reading Honestly, Man by Andrew Pain. Great read so far into the physical and mental crises facing Men, but also what we can do about it. Recommended read for anyone interested in the field of Men’s Health.

Stat of the month

In 2023, women in Ireland reported work-related illness at 22.4 per 1,000 workers, against 13.3 for men, and the rate for women has more than doubled since 2019. The widest gap was in stress, depression or anxiety: 9.0 per 1,000 women against 3.8 per 1,000 men. (Health and Safety Authority, Annual Review of Workplace Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities 2023 to 2024, CSO Labour Force Survey data)

One thing to try this week

Make a one-page map of mental health support for your people. Your EAP, Mental Health First Aid, plus the free services: Pieta, Samaritans, Text About It, Aware, the men’s counselling scheme. Next to each, write what it is for, how to reach it.