Las Vegas may seem like a magical place to the 41 million people that visit each year, but most of us understand that it’s great people who make that magic happen, every day and night, around the clock, 52 weeks each year.

Whether they’re pouring drinks in a fancy casino cocktail lounge or in a friendly sports bar, the bartender is as crucial to this magical mission as the Cirque du Soleil acrobat or the bright, shining headliner whose name is on the marquee. Las Vegas is in the experience business and it takes more than a village. Cooking food, cleaning hotel rooms, singing songs, checking in guests, prepping stages, dealing cards … skills and knowledge are always involved, and the mindset and attitude of a true team player is required. Team Vegas is deep. We’re all in this together, ultimately, but like any profession, it doesn’t always feel that way.

Las Vegas typically tops any poll surveying the best places to build a career in hospitality. The industry offers seemingly infinite options, there remains great opportunity for experienced workers to attain above-average earnings, and the local cost of living is still lower than competing cities. And workers and their powerful unions continue to fight hard for new contracts with wage increases, reduced workloads, job safety protections and more for hundreds of thousands of hospitality workers.

The COVID pandemic forced the American public to become more aware of the plight of essential workers, and in Southern Nevada especially, it became even more clear that hospitality professionals are as essential as it gets. Las Vegas re-learned that it needs to take greater care of those who care for our visitors, and conversations about work-life balance, mental health and growing support services and resources have blossomed as they have in other industries across the country.

“Jobs that are demanding and require a lot of attention and focus like in hospitality, where it’s high-energy and intense, can be validating on one hand, but physically and mentally exhausting as well,” says Shane Kraus, psychology professor and director of the UNLV Behavioral Addictions Lab. “It’s tough in many ways because it’s customer-focused, outward facing, and you’re not supposed to truly express how you really feel. It’s easy to bottle things up.

“These shifts are hard. The work is hard. I think we don’t really understand how much goes into hospitality, on the Strip or off the Strip. We love that Vegas is this great destination and people come here and expect great hospitality, but there’s a lot we have to do. It comes with risk.”

The Behavioral Addictions Lab researches substance use disorders and problem gambling among other psychopathology issues, and Kraus is also a clinical psychologist who treats several patients working in hospitality in Las Vegas. He confirms there isn’t an abundance of research dealing specifically with hospitality jobs and their potential impact on mental health. UNLV’s International Gaming Institute has conducted extensive studies on other industry topics and is currently researching problem gambling treatment and evaluation, among other projects. Kraus notes that hospitality workers have a higher frequency of problem gambling, though there hasn’t been much research on that either.

The potential challenges of working in Vegas hospitality appear obvious: Shifts are long and often stretch into the early morning hours, leading to erratic personal schedules; many positions bring constant exposure to alcohol and other drugs; and the nature of the work—to provide stellar service with a smile, to attend to customers’ varied needs and wants—is inherently stressful. Don’t forget that working for a huge casino company with thousands of employees can make it difficult to connect with co-workers, on top of living in a fast-growing Metropolitan area that’s still categorized as transient and often criticized for lacking the feel of true community.

“If you’re taking a position in the Las Vegas service industry, especially on the casino side, you are deciding on a lifestyle and not necessarily just a job,” says Ronn Nicolli, a respected veteran of the Strip’s nightlife scene who now serves as chief marketing officer at Resorts World Las Vegas. “With [some jobs], it becomes part of your identity. You essentially become engrained in the place you work and you can’t turn it off.

“I’m on my phone 24/7 and when I’m back home in my 9 to 5 town, friends see me constantly going through messages and it’s a foreign thing. But if you’re sitting at a table with other industry professionals in Las Vegas, it’s commonplace that in-between a casual conversation, everyone is checking their phone.”

Hospitality is not unique in this phenomenon, where the work goes home with the worker and the lines between career and lifestyle are blurred. Nicolli, who moved to Las Vegas from a small Ohio town and made his name at Wynn Las Vegas (“It’s like the Harvard of hospitality,” he says) confirms that in many branches of the industry, expectations of excellence saturate most companies, top to bottom. “You have to be on 24/7. You’re there to provide those experiences, on the frontline representing Las Vegas. That probably comes with some mental fatigue, at least, at some point, to maintain that high level.”

Brian Howard is a James Beard Award-nominated chef who came from Michigan and cut his teeth working under many of the Strip’s biggest star chefs for 20 years. He says the restaurant industry culture in which his formative years were spent has changed, for the most part, into a better version of itself. Howard and his management team instill some of the progressive principles they’ve learned through the years at his company Spaghetti On The Wall’s restaurants, Sparrow & Wolf and Half Bird.

“I don’t regret a day of my training, and I never look back and say that was a hard environment or ‘woe is me,’ because I needed that ass-kicking in my life,” he says. “But it’s also changed the way I look at operations. We’re all human and you do have to treat everyone differently. It just comes with growth. We build our culture for a reason and we believe in it, and it starts with putting people first.”

Howard says he personally has struggled with mental health issues, including recently when the first location of Half Bird closed. “I lost a lot of money and I was afraid we might lose everything, and I put myself in a place that led to a dark spot, but coming out of that I realized we were much stronger,” he says.

While Sparrow & Wolf is one of the most acclaimed restaurants in the Valley, Howard’s team has seen some real struggles—two workers have been lost to suicide in the restaurant’s eight years.

“It’s been really tough at times, knowing you just didn’t know what was going on, or that there might have been an opportunity to help more,” Howard says. “Within our group, we try to ensure that people understand we’re a home, and in this house we communicate whether it’s good or bad. Raise your hand and talk about it, or we can [talk] with privacy, but we want to know when one of us is struggling, and we have the resources now and the ability to help each other.”

Las Vegas hospitality jobs may also be coveted for quality employee benefits, including mental health services, treatment and resources. But knowing what your insurance covers and what you have access to is not the same thing as working in an environment that advocates for this important, but still somewhat stigmatized, heath care.

“Companies need to incentivize it,” says Kraus. “I would try to have a summit. Get the top businesses in hospitality to come together and figure out what they’re doing with employee assistance programs, what are the resources. There are ways to do this. We need to have a united front.”

Nicolli says the industry is changing, but “it’s not as front-facing as it should be. The younger generation, I think, seems to share and care a little more in that space, and they are more likely to have those conversations and seek out guidance and help,” he says. “My generation, I think, falls into a transitioning [space] where maybe we don’t know if it’s as acceptable. People still feel like dealing with stress and regular mental struggles openly, it might be identified as weakness, and it’s not. We need to have more consideration if we want people to seek help.”

Howard recently participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Love Yourself Foundation at a coffee shop in Henderson, a conversation specifically focused on mental health needs in Las Vegas hospitality and entertainment. The local nonprofit organization was founded in 2018 to organize events, provide information and offer workshops dealing with wellness and healing, using art and music as ways to connect.

“Because the big cornerstones from the beginning were art and music, that ended up naturally becoming the people we were supporting, those in the hospitality community,” says founder and director Monica Garcia, a Las Vegas resident since the age of 2. “In 2020 I was volunteering at my friend’s organic farm during COVID, and … that’s how I was introduced to Gary LaMorte, the director of Honest Hospitality, when he came to the farm. He was looking to get more support for his staff in terms of wellness and mental health, and he became our first formal donor and had us visit with his staff three times since.”

The Love Yourself Foundation has facilitated different wellness workshops for the Honest staff and a few other local businesses, and the Henderson event was a fundraiser for its new project, the I Am Love Program, designed as a two-year pilot program offering mental and emotional support to local entertainment and hospitality workers. Garcia says her foundation is hoping to raise $250,000 to set up a telehealth system that contracts different mental health professionals to provide convenient counseling and coaching services free of cost. Anyone interested in supporting the project can donate via PayPal and find more information at thelyfoundation.org.

“It’s been a very grassroots and organic way of us realizing these demographics really need this support, learning from different business owners and seeing on the ground level how people in these populations are quite underserved and how they receive help,” she says. “Maybe they’re a gig worker and they don’t have insurance, or maybe they make too much money to have insurance but not enough to get support.”

Kraus says he has come across patients who are working two or three different hospitality jobs in order to make ends meet, employed full-time but not for a single employer so they don’t have access to standard benefits, health insurance and mental health treatment or medication.

Finding those Vegas-specific pockets of need and making sure people who are struggling don’t slip through the cracks is going to require a comprehensive effort, and between upstart local organizations like the Love Yourself Foundation, thoughtful small business owners and the big hospitality corporations, it seems this important conversation is moving forward.

“As [Las Vegas] continues to stand out in the global competition for travelers, we need everyone to play their role and represent the city well, and we can’t do that if we’re dealing with depression and mental illness. We need to call attention to that and provide platforms to get help,” Nicolli says.

Howard and his team are implementing seemingly small adjustments—de-emphasizing alcohol by eliminating the traditional “shift drinks” for employees after work, mandating three-day weekends once a month for management, quarterly outings to volunteer together as a staff—and hoping they add up to a positive, supportive and responsive new culture.

“Things like this cost us more but they’re so much more rewarding, and we haven’t had a lot of turnover within our group while it’s been pretty tough to hire in the last couple of years,” he says. “A lot of people just want to be heard, to know that somebody cares. We’ve got to be bigger.”

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