Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is Shining Light on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. I'm Nicole Clow, Marketing Manager at PCI, and I will be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent a reminder email to all registered attendees. The email contained a webinar attendance sign-in sheet, a guide to downloading your certificate of continuing education, and a PDF of today's presentation. The handouts are also available now and can be found in the handout section located near the bottom of your GoToWebinar toolbox. If there are multiple listeners at your location, please circulate the attendance sheet and send the completed sign-in sheet back to PCI per the instructions on the form. The attendance sheet is only for use at locations with multiple listeners on the line. 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A certificate of completion will be issued to each participant. As such, it does not include content that may be deemed or construed to be an approval or endorsement by RCEP. With hundreds of attendees for our webinars, it is impractical to prepare individual certificates. As PCI has met the standards and requirements of RCEP, you will upload attendance data to www.rcep.net within 10 days, and you can print your certificates of continuing education. Your login name is your email address, so please do not leave that blank if you are completing the sign-in sheet. We need your email address to get you your certificate for this course. AIA credit is not being offered for this presentation. Before I hand the controls over to our presenter for today, I would like to introduce Todd Adams, Sales Manager for the Midwest and West Regions for JVI. All right, thank you very much. So my name is Todd Adams. I've been working for JVI, who's a Supplier Associate of PCI for 30 years, and I also serve as the Executive Director of a different organization called MenLiving, and part of what MenLiving does is raising the awareness and reducing the stigma against mental illness. And I just wanna spend a minute or two introducing Cal and talking about why we think it's important to bring this topic to the people in PCI. I created a task force under Workforce Development at Committee Days last fall, and what we decided was we were gonna create a task force called the Emotional Wellness Task Force. So we just began in the fall of 2023, but we're off doing some wonderful things, including this webinar. But some of the color I wanna bring to the situation is that we, I judge, have a problem in the industry, and the problem is that there is an epidemic of mental illness in the industry, and the way that that shows up is through addiction, through depression, through suicidal ideation, and there's other industries, there's other organizations within construction that are doing a much better job, and it's time for us to catch up. And just to give you two really quick personal stories is I was at the convention in Denver just a month ago, and I went on a run with one of my customers, and he told me that one of their employees died by suicide. I judge that this is happening a lot more often than we're willing to look at. And then the other thing is at the same convention in Denver, I had a man walked up to me, and he said, Todd, I need to tell you a story. And the story is that he had a friend that he worked with at a precast plant, and this man walked up to him, and he was in distress, and he was going through his own version of depression and suicidal ideation, and he was looking for support. And the man who was telling me this story is saying, Todd, I didn't really know how to support him, and so what I told him was that suicide is for a bunch of sissies. He actually used a different word, but I'm modifying it. And a week later, the man died by suicide. So he's like, Todd, I just didn't know how to help this man. So one of the focuses in this task force that I'm creating is to raise awareness, to be able to spot a man or a woman who is in need of some support, and be able to support them in the way that they need. So we do so much in this industry to keep our people physically safe, and I feel like we don't do a good enough job keeping them mentally and emotionally safe. So with that in mind, I'm just gonna share that Cal Beyer, who's gonna be presenting this webinar, is somebody that I have known not too long, but I've become fast friends with. He's a human capital risk management consultant. He's a strategic business advisor. He's a change agent focused on workplace, mental health, suicide prevention, opioid risk reduction, and overdose prevention. He is in it for the right reasons. I can tell you he's a heart-centered individual who cares deeply about the mental wellness of the people in the construction industry, and I am honored that he's decided to spend an hour with us, and my hope and my expectation is this is the first of many interactions with Cal. So with that in mind, I'm gonna turn it over to Cal. Thanks so much for being a part of this, and I hope the webinar is fruitful. Cal, thank you very much, and thank you to PCI for this opportunity, and we just are excited to start a dialogue. Today is the starting point. It's the first step officially in this process, and we want to let people know how and why mental health and suicide prevention is a workplace initiative, and we wanna talk to you about how to address this in your company. I will highlight some of the risk factors, but not go too deep into the weeds on all the risk factors, but mostly want to outline some of those initial steps you can take to address these topics in your organization. I've been involved in this topic for many years, and it's a topic that's become a passion point. I was director of risk management and safety for a aggregate miner, a hot-mix asphalt producer, and then a paving contractor, and it's where we made this a national initiative. I wanted to start with a brief story. Todd's already illustrated the importance of lived experience, but the story I want to share is called The Essence of Hope, and it will follow a gentleman that I met in this process lost a daughter to suicide now about seven years ago. His name is Ray Stenglein, and if you can move the next slide, I think people will enjoy seeing these words, but Ray was writing a story for an article, and he wanted to share the essence of hope, and he said, a human can live four weeks without food, four days without water, four minutes without air, but only four seconds without hope. When I read those words, it deeply resonated. It hit my heart, and I realized that's a story that we need to share. Now, I'd like to say to the audience, I've been involved in this topic for many years. When I was 13, lost a family member to suicide, in our extended family, lost a neighbor, lost prior coworkers to suicide, but on the next slide, I'm going to share a picture of a dear friend who I hired in 2004, and he died by suicide in February of 2015. His name was Jeff. His nickname, he had 30 different nicknames, but my favorite nickname for him was the big dog. He loved it when I called him dog, and he loved the more I drawled with the dog. He'd get a big grin on his face, but this became a very personal mission to my professional mission. I'd been involved in this since 1994, and in construction since 1996, but definitely post-911, pre-hurricane, and post-hurricane Katrina, 2005, 2006, it started to amplify. When I hired Jeff, I thought that he was always okay when he talked about fishing, family, and friends, and Jeff's family gave me permission to share his story to help other families realize how serious mental health is. Jeff struggled with depression from his teenage years, married his high school sweetheart. They had children, raised a family, and Jeff was the natural outdoorsman. That's a near-record fish. He should have a big smile on his face. Very humble man, very flatline emotionally, but I missed some warning signs as a friend. Nothing I've done since is because of guilt. Jeff knew I loved him. I knew he loved me. We were great friends, great for each other. As different as we were, we saw our friendship as strength, but I came to realize Jeff wore a lot of emotional masks. He did not want me to have to help him anymore. He lost his hope just from fighting for so long, swimming against the stream like the proverbial salmon. Every time I'd see Jeff, he'd ask me about my work with suicide prevention nationally, and I literally believed that was his way of saying he was okay. He was telling me what I wanted to hear, and I missed that he was struggling. What I learned in this process was we need to talk more about this, and the one thing I could do as an industry leader was break down stigma, get people to talk about mental health. I started a media saturation campaign. I started an association penetration process. I started working with labor unions because they had critical mass in certain cities, but more than anything, I built an army of helpers along this process, and I declared war on suicide. So I wanted to share those two stories about Ray Stenglein and then my friend Jeff to just have us recognize there are people around us who are struggling, suffering in silence. We want to be empathetic. We want to be caring, compassionate leaders, and we want to provide a workplace that can be a safety net for people who are struggling. So as we move to the next slide, I spend a lot of time in human capital risk management. We talk a lot about workforce risk, and today workforce risk has risen. 60 to 80% of families experience more stress, anxiety, worry since the pandemic. You'll find study after study showing this common phrase now known as burnout to be occurring, and then there are relationship issues, financial pressures, still dealing with unresolved grief from the pandemic. We've got increased caregiving responsibilities, more workers in the workforce are caring for elderly or youth than any time before. It's hard to find adequate daycare. These are causing pressures for workers. They no longer can compartmentalize all the things happening in their personal life. They come to work as the whole person and we need to embrace a whole person wellbeing mindset where we're addressing the emotional needs of those employees. The areas where we will focus greatly today deal with substance misuse and substance use disorder, which contribute to overdoses, but also suicide. What I find is suicide is very complex. There's too many issues to go into, but frequently resolves from unresolved mental illness and a lot of pressures and stress from various factors. So what's important to recognize this rising workforce risk is real. And what you'll find in the next area is mental wellbeing needs to be more strategic in the workplace. Mental illness challenges are common. We're gonna have more success if we talk about wellbeing than if we talk about mental illness. But I want people to recognize these diagnosable mental health conditions are real and they are more common than diabetes, heart disease, or even cancer. And yet rarely in the workplace do we talk about them. And the data has been pretty clear. The National Alliance of Mental Illness and the National Institute for Mental Health report one in five adults in the US have a mental health condition. And then sadly, less than one half of them receive care. The data is actually only 46% receive care. And what's even more startling is there is an 11 year delay from the onset of symptoms to getting a diagnosis to starting a proper treatment. Sometimes that treatment is medication. Sometimes it's self-care practices. Sometimes it's a combination of many different factors. The good news is the quicker we can start care, the likelihood of helping people. Depression is one of those good examples where a diagnosis and starting treatment takes a long time. Imagine if that was a toothache or a sore shoulder or an injured foot. If we waited 11 years to treat physical symptoms, we would be in a world of hurt. We need to treat mental health like we treat physical health. Prompt early intervention, establishing care with a primary care physician and getting specialty help. There's a lot of barriers right now to access to care. So I wanna share a couple of really important data points. I don't want this to be an overload, but these are the common behavioral health data points. If I was doing a live presentation, I would only have one box up at a time and I would release the data. But I just want to cover as much ground as we can so we can move from the why to the how in a subsequent webinar. But here are the major data points for everybody to realize the risk is real and the risk is today and the risk has been tragic to use Todd's word. Anxiety and depression. You'll see data points there. The CPWR, it works in construction research. It's called the Construction Center for Research and Training. The CPR formerly was known as the Center to Protect Workers' Rights, but they work with union and non-union organizations. They're a leading data research group and their data is very respected. Their process is very well respected. 14.3% of construction workers report symptoms and or report taking prescriptions for anxiety. That's higher than the U.S. average and depression as well, 5.7%, more than the U.S. population as a whole. The second factor is heavy and binge drinking. Construction historically has had the second highest rate only to mining. Mining has been about 17 to 17.5%. That's based on the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, SAMHSA. And then the CPWR had a study showing 24% of workers self-reporting heavy and binge drinking in the prior 24 months. The definition roughly that is used for males is five drinks in a single setting multiple times each month. So when I was a risk manager for a construction company, I frequently had workers ask, Cal, do you mean multiple times each week? No, the definition is multiple times each month. And it was a way to just educate people and try to normalize the conversation around heavy and binge drinking. It won't lead people toward recovery, but sharing information, letting people know that help is available is what we want to do. And a third point is substance use disorder. The National Safety Council has been a reliable source for over 20 years in this area. They say for all industries, 8.5%, 1 in 12, would have a substance use disorder. Those range in degree of severity, but the most severe would be people who might ultimately become incapacitated to work. In the lesser, it'd be people who are failing drug tests and not having a pathway toward recovery. These are opportunities for us to get people help sooner. And by sharing resources about recovery options, 12-step and non-12-step programs alike. But here's where this becomes a real safety issue. Muscular skeletal injuries, a leading source of opioid prescriptions. The data is very clear. 34% of construction workers report at least one multiple or muscular skeletal injury. And then the more MSDs you have, multiple muscular skeletal disorders, sprains, strains to necks, shoulders, backs, knees, the more likelihood, up to three to four times more likely to have opioids. And then suicide, no data existed until July of 2016. And the data most recently was updated late 2023. It showed for the extraction industry, mining predominantly, 72 workers died by suicide per 100,000. You're more in that construction number, even though it's blended trades, 56 per 100,000 workers for males. And a number of 10.4 for females. There is some variance among trades. There are some trades that are almost one and a half times that number, but predominantly just for today, we are three and a half times higher than the US average, almost four. When you look at that average being about 4.5 per one, 14.5 per 100,000 workers. What's important is more workers in construction die by suicide than by all occupational injuries combined. There's data that shows well over 5,400 suicides per year in construction. And sadly, we know these numbers are very under reported. So we just want you to know these are challenges. What my biggest concern has been since 2017, roughly when we saw the response to this data was looking at the risk of overdose. We knew the opioid crisis was getting worse. And last August, the CDC released data for 2020. And this showed construction as the highest industry. They combined extraction and construction and had a number of 162.6 overdose deaths per 100,000. For construction, that number was two and a half times that 56 for suicide, 130.9. And mining has done a little bit better at 60.9. They have more automation, more mechanization, and they jumped on this probably four to five years earlier than other industries. So we wanted you to realize these risks are real. What I'd like to show on the next slide would be just some of the representative risk factors. For today, I can't go into the detail, but really I've had four categories that I've been teaching and talking about for many years. Industry culture is a big factor. We've been known for being a tough guy, tough gal culture. We know that we didn't talk about our feelings. Talking about our feelings, talking about needing help was viewed as a sign of weakness, not a sign of strength. And so some of the other factors I talked about, but we've also seen accelerated construction schedules and a lot of separation from families when workers are working remotely and different distances. So industry factors. Then there were company factors, company leadership, the level of training, the span of control, the scope of work, where they worked, what their schedules were in terms of where they did work, where they did projects, how often they traveled, things that are unique to each company, the culture, the climate within that organization. If they had a caring culture, if they were just production oriented, not thinking about people and wellbeing, having flexibility and autonomous schedules, just to name a few factors. The third factor I call job, task and environmental. Those were specific environmental challenges, heat, working in cold, to name a couple. And there's so many. The amount of muscular skeletal injuries from lack of mechanization because of the need for manual labor or the body contortions that are very common in many of the construction trades. And the last major category is what we called worker lifestyle. We found that there were a lot of similarities among workers and the research was pointing to a lot of this. You'll see that list in the column. Some of these are lifestyle choices. Some of them are related to the choice of the profession. The seasonality of work contributes to some of those. The end of project furloughs, lack of paid time off has been identified as a factor that cuts across all four of those risk factors. So today was not to go deep dive into the risk factors, just to say, this is why our industry has had these challenges. The biggest part, we didn't talk about it and we weren't doing things about it. So I wanna share with you some of the strategies that we've seen work for instituting a leadership and cultural approach to workplace mental health. And I'd like to just jump to the first poll question. Nicole, if you could launch that and please read that question. Audience, please participate in responding to the polls. Hopefully that's been pushed out to you. Nicole, I'm not hearing you. Are you able to? So poll has been launched. The very first question is, has your organization addressed mental health and suicide prevention? We do have some responses coming in, so I'll keep it open for a little bit longer. Thank you, Nicole. And when those responses come in and are launched, if you would please read those, that would be very helpful. If you would please read those, that would be very helpful. And that's just great to see that we're getting participation. I'm going to be excited to hear the results. I'm not able to see those today, but I'll be happy to hear what the audience is telling us. And then, Nicole, once the first one is done in red, we're going to move right to the second poll question as well. But this will give us an example of knowing what type of resources Todd Adams and his well-being committee might look at being able to provide to PCI additional educational opportunities, resource materials that can be shared. You'll see a couple of resource documents that I've previously provided to PCI for the annual convention. So, Nicole, I'll stop talking so you're able to share the poll results. Perfect. It doesn't look like everyone was able to see the poll. So we don't have all results in. We only have very few. So it's kind of been a tie between have not started or way behind, know we need to do so if your organization has addressed mental health and suicide prevention. Some companies have taken baby steps, and they're still wobbling, still figuring it out. And a couple of companies are doing more each year, getting buy-in, and they're figuring it out along the way. We did not have any one comment on feel confident workers and families have all necessary support. Yeah, so thank you, audience, for the participation. What we expected was what we heard, Nicole's response. More are just starting or feel behind, and some are just starting the process. What's important is don't wait for the perfect process. Begin. If you have a genuine care for your employees, they will know it. And it doesn't have to be perfect. It's better to start than wait. And these will be some of the things that we'll follow up with. So Nicole, I'm going to give you a choice. Since the polling wasn't working, we could just move on, and we'll save poll questions for a subsequent webinar. It's up to you. Or if you want to do what we just did, I'm comfortable either way. Unfortunately, it might be best to save the poll questions because it doesn't look like it's getting through to everyone. Yeah, let's do that then. And the audience, we apologize, but we'll move forward. So I think what's really important here is what I was seeing for many years in this topic is we were focused on getting people home safe at the end of a shift. But people were struggling out, work and at home. We needed to shift the mindset. It was great to have a safety 24-7 mindset, but we focused on getting people home safe at the end of a shift. When I went to work for the construction company in 2014, I was reframing safety 24-7. We have to focus on getting people back to work safe from home. That was a different mindset. Those people who were struggling could have been anything from mental health, could have been substance use disorder, could have been substance misuse. But we also found examples of legal challenges, financial matters, relationship struggles, divorce, custody challenges with children, a car bill, a new car payment, combined with a seasonal furlough. Whatever the issue was, we wanted people to know that help was available. That as an employer, they could speak with us, that resources were available. We learned how to make better referrals to employee assistance programs. We learned how to talk to people in a hopeful way to give them ideas for help, shared resources. That shift of safety 24-7 was really important. And if we move to the next slide, I want to highlight, I co-authored a national survey with the Center for Workplace Mental Health. The full report is downloadable. And we will get this to PCI. So you have it as a link that you'll be able to share. But this national survey in 2021 and 2022 highlighted four key workplace mental health strategies. And the four leading behaviors of building a mentally healthy culture were getting leaders involved. So having engaged company leadership. We'll talk more about each of these. The second was have to build awareness around mental health, sharing resources. The third was how to build this into the organizational culture, how to integrate this into safety, health, wellness, but also HR, human resources, and employee benefit functions. And the last of the four strategies turns out to be really important. How do we increase access to care, services, and support? So I'd like to just highlight this idea of leadership engagement. We identified these three Vs as being critical. It's something I've been talking about for many years, teaching leaders with a caring culture to be visible and vocal supporters of mental health. But it turns out one of the secret sauces is having leaders who are vulnerable sharing their own struggles, their own feelings, their own solutions to addressing mental health. When we have visible and vocal leaders and they become vulnerable and share their story, their journey, their success in addressing mental health themselves, their family, or in their organization, people realize it's safe to talk about. It creates this culture where people know they're not gonna face reprisals. They're gonna have empathy. They're gonna be understood and resources are gonna be provided. So this leadership engagement is critical. Those three Vs are powerful. And where you have the three Vs, a fourth V frequently emerges. I call it vertical. Up and down the organization chart, people step forward to offer their story to help their peers. And that is a powerful story. Now, the next strategy is how we raise awareness and that works well by integrating HR with employee benefits, but also safety and health. This is too big for one discipline. So making this a team sport in an organization with leadership support, having safety and health, but also HR and employee benefits, each implementing programs and practices, but doing so in alignment. So they're doing it in concert. Takes away confusion, gives people a clear sense that the organization is concerned and committed and they're taking steps in unison. One thing that we know frequently, safety and health professionals who are at job sites or in production facilities might have closer relationships with workers. So if the company has had HR handling things like employee assistance programs to preserve privacy and confidentiality, we need to share more information with more people how to access that employee assistance program. And I give that as one example of many, but if you have an integrated approach, you're more likely to reach more people at different points in their employment cycle. People who are having children, people who are dealing with bereavement and grief might have different needs, but it's all part of that caring culture. Now there's many opportunities. I'm gonna give you a few examples of how you can address this both at the company level and at the job site level. So the next slide really highlights opportunities to discuss mental wellbeing. At the company level, you'll see examples. Some of the best have been orientation programs and onboarding processes. Frequently people talk about mental health and the EAP during a benefits open enrollment meeting. But if we find ways to weave this in more regularly throughout the calendar year, it works really well. But where I've seen this really take off is when we feel comfortable addressing this at the job site and the project level, building it in through safety huddles, toolbox talks, sometimes doing a company-wide stand down, even if our association isn't doing it, even if our project owners and GCs are not doing it, but saying, hey, we're committed to this topic. So I wanted to give you some examples. I can't go into enough detail, but I wanted you to have slides that you would have this opportunity. Now, the next slide really gives examples of what companies have done for this integration process between safety, HR, and employee benefits. So I listed even more examples, and I just felt like this would be a good, tangible takeaway for your company to say, do I understand what each of these items are? Do I need additional information? I think wallet cards, hardhat stickers, posters have been great ways. I love showing up on a job site, seeing banners that declare this a mental health judgment-free zone. Companies are addressing this in different ways. Companies are coming up with their own themes and their own logo and their own title for the name of their program, and that's them taking ownership. And the same on the HR side, opportunities to weave this in to many different functions. I just want to highlight real quickly, the way that this happens is what we call creating a mentally healthy culture, where this becomes the DNA. This idea of the caring culture is really important, and there are a few things to be sensitive to, but it's very important. If you're going to help employees address mental health challenges, we need to have no reprisals in the workplace. We need people to feel comfortable about coming forward. I want to be clear. You can have a caring culture and still be accountability-based. There still can be consequences, but the consequence can't be that someone stepped forward. They can't be the first person laid off. They can't be the first person furloughed. We have to find ways of helping people with support. Building a mentorship and ultimately a peer-to-peer support is one way to really drive this to the next level. I had a call this morning with a couple of national organizations that are building resources on peer-to-peer support, and that's where this becomes part of the culture. So this is an overview. It's to let you know about these strategies. It's to let you know about the risk factors. It's to let you know how and why we should address it. The next area is going to highlight how important resources and support are. Many companies will say they have an employee assistance program, but very few know the name of their program. Very few know telephone numbers. They wait for a crisis, and then they're scrambling to look for that information. You want to test your EAP. You want to understand who's eligible. When are they eligible? What services are offered? And then how can we reach the EAP? Maybe it's website. Maybe it's text. Maybe it's chat, or possibly still just a traditional phone call. And you want to know what the hours of service are. Does it have limitations? Is it only available 8 to 5 or 8 to 8, or is it 24-7? These are some of the important things, and I encourage companies to really do a deep dive on their EAP. Historical utilization in our industry has hovered between a half of a percent of employees and one to one and a half would be on the high side. There are companies today that have invested time in relaunching their EAP, who I'm seeing have as much as 15 to 20% EAP utilization, people getting help when they need help. So the next slide is an example. We're not going to spend time on it. You're going to get a download of these, but these five questions, I usually know if a company is utilizing their EAP well with those simple five questions. So this is a quick knowledge check. You can do it after today, but I just wanted you to recognize with as few as five, I have a pretty good idea if an organization is leveraging their EAP. And the last slide in this section is giving examples of what construction companies have done to improve access to care and how they broke down barriers. This was built with just 14 examples. I probably could add another 30 examples of what different companies have done. But when I started to see companies doing these, multiple companies, I added it to this list. And just to keep this simple for today, I wanted people to see there's a wide range of options and strategies, techniques, and methods that are being used to offer employees and their families more help. It's not all-inclusive. It's not an exhaustive list. It's just representative examples. And where I wanted to shift next will be crisis prevention. Wanted people to recognize Becky or Nicole, if you would move to the slide that says, learn suicide prevention warning signs. I think what's important is sharing information with people. What I'm finding as I do this work across the country, very few people know about the hotlines that are available. Since July of 2022, we have had in this nation a three-digit mental health crisis hotline. It's 988. I was in Colorado yesterday. I was speaking to 250 employees, roughly, and only four hands went up that people were aware that that existed. So one of the simplest things you can do is share information about the hotlines that I'll share next. But I wanted people to recognize, if you see employees who are changing their behavior, who are showing up at work differently, there's different signs of stress. There's different levels of distress. But fundamentally, we want to have a way to have a safety conversation with employees. We want to give you the tools, and we can do this in a separate webinar. Today is to familiarize you that there is a reason why we want to do this, and then we want to share with you there is a how. The next step would be that what. So some of the tools you have, you may have that employee assistance program. If you're a union, you may have a second employee assistance program for the represented employees by that union. Sometimes our companies are signatory to multiple union contracts, and each of them might have a separate EAP. But some companies have said, we're going to use our company EAP, even if we have to pay more to cover all employees, because I want to message effectively one EAP to all of our employees. So you'll have to make the determination what works best, but that starts with understanding your EAP. Beyond that EAP, you have 988, the suicide and crisis lifeline, and then the old number was a 10-digit number. It was then called the suicide prevention lifeline. Those two numbers coexist. Any calls that go into 800-273-8255 are going to be referred to 988. So if you have old wallet cards, hard hat stickers, if you have posters that show that green suicide prevention lifeline, it's okay. All those calls are being captured by 988. And what they've done is assembled a network of nationwide hotlines. And generally, the call is going to be routed by the extension of the phone, the area code. So I happen to live in a suburb of Seattle, but I have a Minnesota cell phone from where I live 12 years. If I dial 988, I'm going to get referred most likely to somewhere in Minnesota. And then they'll have overflow networks. And that is only important if you live in an area with multiple area codes or you have transient workers in your area who are not local. They might not get local resources. But bottom line, 988 works. I want to keep this simple. I'm a big supporter. It's a starting point. It's free. It's 24-7, 365, even in leap years. And it's a reliable service, trained volunteers. They care and they're well connected to resources. To be able to help people. When someone calls 988, they're doing an assessment. They're looking to see if there's an immediacy to risk or if it's an informational call. So they triage. And I always encourage people to make a demo call so you know what it's like to call 988. You'll get practice, what happens when I call, what's the anticipated rate, what did it sound like. One thing that you'll hear in 988 is a call order. It'll be prompts for different levels of service. There's three areas that have been highlighted. One is veterans. So we'll say if you are a veteran looking for the veterans crisis line, you'll press one. If you're looking for Spanish, conversation in Spanish, you'll press two. And the third high-risk group that had a dedicated youth line was the LGBTQ youth. All three veterans, Spanish needed separate language and the LGBTQ youth were considered high-risk and needed to have special access to service. So I wanted you to be aware of 988. That's the future of behavioral health. What's happening behind the scenes is a lot of funding being channeled so we can expand. Ultimately, behavioral health response teams could be a part of the future in more states as success and funding is secured. So I shared that on hardhat stickers and wallet cards, posters, you can create your own. I can also work with PCI to share additional links so you can find additional examples. There's a group called the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention. I'll share that in a few minutes. They have some templates you can purchase or you can download. And then I wanted you to be aware of what's called Crisis Text Line. It also is free, confidential, 24-7. And it's available for people who don't want to make a telephone call, but who you want to still make a referral to getting help. And here you would text the word help or connect to 741741. And normally after a 30-second processing response, you'll get back an automated text response. We're looking for a counselor and then a counselor is available. Hi, my name is Becky. How can I help you? Or whatever that person's name is. I just use Becky as an example. But I think what's important here, these are two options that make it easy for you to supplement beyond your employee assistance program. You could do it on one poster. You could share it on wallet cards. There's many ways of communicating this to employees. So if we move to the next slide, I think I want to highlight for you, bottom line, any one of these approaches are five action steps. It's kind of a process. And what you'll do is you're going to ask a person if they're in emotional pain, if they're showing signs of distress, you're going to ask, are you okay? Are you really okay? I'm here. I care for you. I want to help you. Ultimately, I'll show you another tool for having a five-step discussion. But one of the steps we need to ask is if a person is thinking about killing themselves. And that's a very direct question. It feels like it's awkward, but we can do a lot of good in that regard. And then we want to keep that person safe. We want to be there. We want to stay connected. We want to reinforce and check in with people. It's a really important process. Now, that next slide shows you what that five-step method is. And the method that I like to teach is called Learn Saves Lives. It's from the University of Washington. They have a group called Forefront Suicide Prevention. There are many forms of what's called gatekeeper training. You have the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, AFSP.org. They have a program called Talk Saves Lives. There's another method of gatekeeper. It's called QPR, Question, Persuade, Refer. Both methods get you to ask open-ended questions to check in with people, to see what their response is, to see if they need support and help, and for you to demonstrate care, concern, empathy, maybe compassion. What I like about this five-step model, it's in the public domain. It can be easily taught and learned. What I like about it is every letter in that stands for a step. So, we're not going to go through this today. It's to let you know that there is a method. You can go to that website. You can see information. They do have a one-hour downloadable class on their training tab of their website to learn the Learn Saves Lives method. But the L in learn stands for look for warning signs. The E is empathize and listen. The A step is asking directly about suicide. The R is removing dangers. If someone says yes, they've contemplated or considered suicide. And the N step is really important. It's the next step. What referrals can we make? EAP, 988, Crisis Text Line, or other social service or community-based organizations. The powerful thing here, no one's asking you to do diagnosis. No one's asking you to do anything more than be an ally and to be sensitive and to listen and to guide that person toward help. That to me is why workplace mental health and suicide prevention can be so effective. Now, today, we decided to combine both mental health and suicide prevention because it is such an important issue in our industry. But if you have an opportunity, if you're just starting out, thinking about how to make this about worker well-being, you'll miss a lot of the stigma associated with mental illness. People are thinking about mental illness when we even say mental health. When we hear the words mental health, it should mean the absence of mental illness. So if we have an opportunity to talk about worker well-being, we can build in more prevention discussions. So even when I was the risk manager, I focused more on physical health. I started with hearing protection to let people know I cared about them. We talked about hydration and nutrition to avoid fatigue, to protect our bodies. As industrial athletes, we needed to do warm-up exercise programs and we needed to stay physically fit so we could avoid muscular skeletal injuries. We talked about heat-related illness and, again, the importance of proper hydration, which gave me an opportunity to teach about not drinking too much caffeinated or energy drinks and minimizing alcohol because those things can dehydrate us. When employees saw that we genuinely cared about their physical well-being, they were open to us talking about emotional well-being. I also wanted you to think about in the event something bad ever happens, doing what's called a critical incident response, bringing professionals on site to talk to your leaders and your employees about what happened and how they're feeling about it. A lot of times we use this after a catastrophic work comp injury and we let people know, sorry that you witnessed, you know, severe injury yesterday or we're sorry to tell you about the loss of a colleague. I'm seeing more organizations use that approach because it does emphasize that caring culture. Your EAP should be able to help you and that's just a pathway since post 9-11. I've been helping contractors in various sectors of construction respond to those workplace challenges and it's how I got very effective at talking about workplace mental health and ultimately then about suicide. But this learn saves lives is a great model. What I'd like to do is just scroll through quickly a few additional resources I've provided for you. Wanted to share with you, I talked several times about wallet cards. There's a link to an article I did for construction executive and it shows you some of the elements of a pocket packet. The pocket packet is a coin envelope. It included a couple of different hard hat stickers and three different wallet cards. And we could share this with our employees. When we started sharing with employees, if there was a suicide at a child's school from one of our workers, they would ask if they could take 50 of the packets to the school because the teachers wanted to know how to talk about this. We had veterans sharing this at veterans reunions. We had 30 and 40-year work veterans going back to a class reunion who said, hey, we've lost a couple of classmates to suicide. Can I take some of these packets? We just got very good at making bulk packets and sharing them with different organizations. So that's one strategy. And the second I wanted to share with you is an example of role-playing scenarios. There's an article. It was how to use wallet cards to teach peer-to-peer support for mental health. And I just wanted you to know, when we taught employees using wallet cards how to call the EAP, they started sharing it with their families. They started sharing it with each other. And within a week, we had employees helping employees. Within a month, there were examples of families helping other families with situations in their lives. And by the end of the next quarter, in every one of our divisions, we had employees sharing their personal stories. And the powerful examples came when our employees were sharing those with their business partners. So subcontractors or general contractors, equipment suppliers and dealers. It was powerful. Our employees embraced it. So I thought you would appreciate seeing a couple of examples. The last thing I'm going to do is just go quickly through a couple of resources. There will be a link to a website on the PCI website or a place, a webpage. And this is the workforce development sheet. And then under wellness, there are different areas that you can expand out. Todd and his group working with PCI are going to be updating that on a regular basis. The next slide shows the organization Todd referenced called Men Living. And it's a group that I find to be very purposeful, very intentional. Todd and his group of leaders that are organized around helping people in construction lead a regular series of meetings. And it's one of the coolest ground up organizations I've seen throughout our industry. And so that's how Todd and I became those fast and furious organizations. The last thing I want to highlight then would be a couple of screening tools. One is called Man Therapy. It's been a very useful program. 400,000 people have gotten immediate help by doing that 20 point head inspection checklist and then clicking that they need to talk to someone. It's been one of the most powerful processes of people breaking down barriers and saying I need help of any tool I've seen. Mantherapy.org. They've got videos that use humor to break down mental health stigma. And then I did talk about the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention. The website is www.preventconstructionsuicide.com. And it's been powerful. And these are some of the examples of posters that we used in the early days to really propel this mission. They still have great resources available for you. And then last but not least, there's organizations you can partner with. Some company leaders are like I'm never going to feel comfortable talking to my employees about this. In every state in the nation, there are chapters for these two groups and others. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the National Alliance on Mental Illness. And I encourage you go to their websites, check by state, get the contact info, reach out to them, ask what information do you have. It will give you connections to two organizations that are volunteer driven and do a great job. And the last link I want to provide is to Construction Suicide Prevention Week. This has been every September for the last four years. That website has some very useful resources. They've done a great job mobilizing the industry, sharing information, and just really excited to see that PCI has started this process. My contact info is available. And I just wanted to make that available to you. If you have questions, if you're like, hey, I got someone I'm concerned about, don't call me for a crisis. Use 988 or your EAP or crisis text line. But if you have a question about, hey, how would I even start this? This is what my challenge is. I'm happy to offer guidance to anyone who needs a follow-up consultation. PCI, thank you for the opportunity to be with you. If there are questions, I'm happy to yield. Or as we talked, if questions come in, you're welcome to send those to me. I'll prepare responses. And then you can send that out to everyone if it's time for us to hang up. But thank you very much for the opportunity to be with you for this introductory Shining Light on Mental Health and Suicide Prevention. And Nicole, I'll pass it back over to you for the thank you and closing comment. Perfect. Thank you, Cal. So, on behalf of PCI, I'd like to thank Cal for a great and informative presentation. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we have enough time for questions today. But any questions that were sent through the questions pane will be forwarded to Cal along with your contact information. And what we can also do is group those questions together as like an FAQ sheet to also send to all attendees for today. As a reminder, certificates of continuing education will appear in your account at www.rcep.net within 10 days. If you have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketing at pci.org. Thank you again. Have a great day and please stay safe.

mental health

suicide prevention

construction industry

workplace mental health

Learn Saves Lives

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline

Crisis Text Line

Man Therapy

Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention

Construction Suicide Prevention Week