Covista’s Walden University Professor Dr. Melissa Mork: Prescribing Mental Health Awareness in Healthcare

“When you are walking through the darkest moments of your life, look for the humor—it will tether you back to your own humanity and connect you to one another. Also, listen for the laughter, especially your own. That laughter tells you that you are going to be OK.”

This was Dr. Melissa Mork’s invitation to her TEDx audience during a talk on using dark humor as a coping skill. As a tenured professor of forensic psychology at Covista’s Walden University, a Certified Humor Professional, grief counselor and internationally bestselling author, Dr. Mork has spent nearly 20 years studying dark humor as a psychological survival mechanism—for caregivers, first responders and anyone doing some of society's most demanding jobs. Her work examines the darkest human experiences and the unexpected ways people find their way through them.

Every hospital leader and clinician on their team should be paying attention. The people caring for America are stressed out, and for too long, the system has asked them to push through without giving them permission to be anything other than invincible. Dr. Mork's work is a direct challenge to that expectation.

Finding humor in the hardest places

Dr. Mork grew up on a small dairy farm in southwestern Minnesota, in a family of eight children. She was drawn to comedy early—the Bob Newhart Show was a fixture of her childhood—and eventually left home to pursue an acting career in Los Angeles. A disabling autoimmune disorder ended that chapter. With no savings, no income and her family unable to help, she found herself homeless, living out of her car in the San Fernando Valley. A car accident and a small insurance settlement eventually gave her the means to go home.

From there, she built a rewarding life, entering college, getting married and having two children. In between these milestones, she also faced tough personal losses. Her mother was killed in a car accident. Her father died not long after. She turned her grief into research, enrolling in a master’s program and writing a thesis on how people find their way through loss. She went on to earn a doctorate in clinical and forensic psychology.

Years later, she would face tragedy once again when her husband was diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer. He died 140 days later, leaving her to raise her two children alone.

Through all of it, humor kept showing up as a lifeline. "That's one of the benefits of humor in grief," she said. "We feel closer to the person. The goal of grief is really to feel—to find a different way of connecting to and relocating them in our hearts."

The permission slip

Dr. Mork came to teaching serendipitously. After graduate school and early clinical work, she discovered that teaching was its own kind of calling.  “I didn’t know I was going to have this opportunity to walk alongside these adults who are being very courageous in their steps toward a new future,” she said. “It has been a profound privilege to help them accomplish and realize their goals.”

Many of her students are law enforcement officers, first responders and healthcare workers, all sharing a particular kind of humor. Dark. Specific. When a student once asked her whether his dark humor had gone too far, she went looking for an answer in the research. What she found was clear: dark humor is a healthy coping strategy when used in the right context, with the right people. It offers a moment of reprieve for people working under sustained stress.

She gives her students permission to use it. Use humor as you need to get through the day, she tells them—as long as you're also leaning on peer support, nurturing your relationships outside work and accessing therapy when you need it. Humor isn't a substitute for care. It's a release that makes care possible.

The same logic applies to self-care for healthcare workers. "Self-care isn't indulgent," Dr. Mork said. "It's something that's absolutely critical. If I'm taking care of me, then I'm going to have the bandwidth and the capacity to care for others." What she's really describing is permission: to have limits, to fail and to be human in a job that asks you to be unbreakable.

Building a healthcare workforce that can thrive

Walden University, where Dr. Mork teaches, is a leading provider of mental health graduate degrees in the country, offering graduate programs in clinical mental health counseling, school counseling and psychiatric-mental health nursing. The institution is training the counselors, therapists and mental health nurses that the country needs, and doing so with a faculty that understands what this work demands and how to manage it over time.

That commitment extends across Covista. Through our partnership with the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare, we have introduced Schwartz Rounds at five hospitals where our alumni serve—bringing care teams together to process the emotional weight of caregiving and advance compassion for patients.

Covista is also the founding corporate partner of the national ALL IN: Caring for Caregivers cohort through the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation, which works to remove structural barriers to mental healthcare for healthcare workers and integrate wellbeing into standard health system operations. Most recently, the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Reauthorization Act was signed into law—a meaningful step forward for healthcare worker wellbeing.

“As America's largest healthcare educator, we graduate more than 24,000 healthcare professionals every year. Sending them into the workforce not just clinically prepared, but ready to thrive in all aspects of the job is at the heart of what we do." said Megan Noel, Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, Covista. "Dr. Mork's work—the research, the teaching, the permission she gives her students to be human—is part of how we do that and reflects our commitment to supporting the healthcare workforce.”