Frank King

Suicide Prevention in the Workplace as a Health and Safety Issue

Frank King helps workplaces appreciate the critical need for suicide prevention, creating a forum for dialogue and critical thinking about workplace mental health challenges. It builds a business case for suicide prevention while promoting help-seeking and help-giving. Interactive exercises and case studies help employers and their staff apply and customize the content to their specific work culture.

Program content is divided into four chapters:
- Suicide Prevention in the Workplace
- What to Do When Someone is Suicidal
- Conversations About Suicide
- Suicide Postvention

Value to Members:
Developed by the Carson J Spencer Foundation, the Working Minds: Suicide Prevention in the Workplace program toolkit features a facilitator’s guide, trainee workbooks, and supplemental materials designed to help workplace administrators and employees better understand and prevent suicide. The program helps workplaces appreciate the critical need for suicide prevention while creating a forum for dialogue and critical thinking about workplace mental health challenges. The program builds a business case for suicide prevention while promoting help-seeking and help-giving. Several interactive exercises and case studies help employers and their staff apply and customize the content to their specific work culture.

Working Minds was developed to address a gap in suicide prevention programming for those of working age. The toolkit was built on best practices and the insights of mental health service providers, human resource professionals, and top suicide prevention experts from across the country.

ROI: Increase profit while transforming culture and improving wellbeing
Mental illness and substance abuse cost employers an estimated $225.8 billion each year, according to a recent study, that featured a random sample of over 28,000 workers in the US. The largest indirect cost of mental illness comes in the form of decreased performance due to absenteeism, or regularly missing work, and presenteeism, or working while sick.

While most employers notice absenteeism, they often overlook presenteeism. A study measuring health-related productivity estimated that individuals working with untreated illnesses cost employers $1,601 per person each year.

CEOs underestimate the hidden costs of employee wellbeing. Overestimating the importance of physical health and underestimating the cost and prevalence of mental illness leads to wasteful spending and decreased life satisfaction of employees.

Make a Living, Not a Difference

The perfect after dinner (or breakfast or lunch) keynote when all you're after is comedy entertainment. The first ten or fifteen minutes can be customized to your group, industry and/or association.

Get Up Off Your Aspirations

You will not "get a check-up from the neck up" (and if I hear that phrase one more time, I may throw up). You will not learn any of "the 7 habits of highly effective people" (one of which has to be over-using the word paradigm). Nor will you learn how to think out of the box, break the secret code of accomplishment, fly with eagles (even though you work with turkeys) or be empowered (whatever that means) in any way. What will happen is, you'll laugh. And you'll get loads of practical real-life lessons Frank King has learned the hard way. Lessons like, if you're driving and you get sleepy, by all means, take a nap, but remember to pull over and stop first. Or lessons like, you should never get married thinking "I'm not sure I should be doing this, but I guess I'll just give it a try." Or a lesson like the best way to deal with change is a three-part plan: Get Over It.

Lube, Oil and Valve Job

You'll get practical, everyday advice on maintaining good health from a guy who had an aortic valve transplant and lived to joke about it. Advice like: never eat anything that had bad parents. Or: yes, McDonald's cooks their French fries in vegetable oil, but what about the rest of the food in that place? You just look at the McMenu, your cholesterol is gonna jump a half a dozen points. Or: if Mother Nature didn't make it and/or you can't pronounce it, then you shouldn't eat it.

Suicide Prevention and Postvention for Corporations, Associations, and Colleges

Depression is the most common mental health disorder in the workplace 1 and affects about one in 10 employees. Mental illness, when untreated or under-treated, often manifests as a performance issue, such as absenteeism or compromised productivity. The annual economic, indirect cost of mental illnesses is estimated to be at least $79 billion. Most of that amount–approximately $63 billion—reflects the cost of lost productivity. Mental illness causes more days of work loss and work impairment than chronic health conditions such as diabetes, asthma, arthritis, back pain, hypertension, and heart disease.

What’s the solution?

Let’s say you’re an HR professional or Supervisor, and one of your Direct Reports has a heart attack, what do you do? Chances are you’ll know what sort of First Aid is required. You’ll start CPR, and continue until someone arrives with the paddles, and yells “Clear.” But what if you’re an HR professional or Supervisor, and one of your Direct Reports confides in you that they are depressed? Will you have any idea what sort of Mental Health First Aid to administer? Are you in any way qualified to be a Mental Health First Responder? Before you can know how to help, you need to know when to help. It’s what’s called mental health literacy—or a basic understanding of what different mental illnesses and addictions are, how they can affect a person’s daily life, and what helps individuals experiencing these challenges get well.

As a comedian, speaker, and mental health activist, who battles depression, Frank will teach your group, with a healthy dose of humor, on these topics:

• Depression and mood disorders
• Anxiety disorders
• Trauma
• Psychosis
• Substance Use disorders

Mental Health First Aid teaches about recovery and resiliency—the belief that individuals experiencing these challenges can and do get better, use their strengths to stay well and return to full productivity.

When Frank speaks, you’ll learn how to properly apply the Mental Health First Aid action plan in a variety of situations, including when someone is experiencing:

• Panic attacks
• Suicidal thoughts or behaviors
• Non-suicidal self-injury
• Acute psychosis (e.g., hallucinations or delusions)
• Overdose or withdrawal from alcohol or drug use
• Reaction to a traumatic event

Change: Living on Borrowed Time, and Upside Down on the Loan

Using humor to find the chuckles in change, the humor in the hurt, and the punchlines in the pain.

Heart Health: Living Heart Health Happily

Healing hearts with humor one ticker at a time.

Networking is a Contact Sport, Down, Ready, Set, Connect!

It’s not what they can do for you, but what you can do for them that matters.

Ask the Patient

The most underused resource in healthcare is the patient. Make the patient part of the team. They have a dog in the hunt, a horse in the race, they literally, skin in the game.

Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Nurse

In healthcare, nurses do the heavy lifting, literally. I just did this one for the first time earlier this month down at Gwinnett Medical Center outside of Atlanta.

Nothing About Me, Without Me; the Top Ten Things Healthcare Personnel Can Do to Encourage Patient Engagement

Mission: How doctors, nurses, patients, and caregivers can partner for higher quality care, greater patient satisfaction, and thereby, a better bottom line.

The information era is finally invading and converging with the world of healthcare. Moreover, the information is flowing in a new way. Until recently the doctors had full control over the data, marked asymmetric access to the information.

Now, the information is directly available to the patient. In recent years the term “shared decision” referred to the scenario where their doctor and the patient made informed decisions together. With the new era of “information parity” the question is, will the patient share the data with their doctor.

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Michael Specter wrote, “the era of paternalistic medicine, where the doctor knew best, and the patient felt lucky to have him, has ended.”

According to Eric J. Topal, MD, author, Creative Destruction of Medicine, “we need to welcome and nurture a partnership model whereby each patient is fully engaged, informed, activated, and intimately involved with his or her medical arc.”

All in the pursuit of higher quality care, greater patient satisfaction, and thereby, a better bottom line.