SPEAKER SPOTLIGHT
FRANK KING
Suicide Prevention in the Workplace As a Health and Safety Issue
3 CE Credits
Frank helps workplaces appreciate the critical need for suicide prevention, creating a forum for dialogue and critical thinking about workplace mental health challenges. He 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
Mental illness and substance abuse cost employers an estimated $225.8 billion each year, according to a recent study based on 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.
BIOGRAPHY
Frank King, suicide prevention and postvention public speaker and trainer, was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, is a corporate comedian, syndicated humor columnist, and podcast personality, who was featured on CNN’s Business Unusual. Depression and suicide run in his family. He’s thought about killing himself more times than he can count. He’s fought a lifetime battle with depression and thoughts of ending his life, turning that long dark journey of the soul into a TED Talk, “A Matter of Laugh or Death,” and sharing his lifesaving insights on mental and emotional health awareness, with corporation, association, youth (middle and high school), and college audiences.
As an inspirational and motivational public speaker and trainer, Frank uses the life lessons from the above, as well as lessons learned as a rather active consumer of healthcare (both mental and physical) to start the conversation, giving people who battle mental and emotional illness permission to give voice to their feelings and experiences surrounding depression and suicide, and to create a common pool of knowledge in which those who suffer, and those who care about them, can swim. And doing it by coming out, as it were, and standing in his truth, and doing it with humor. He believes that where there is humor there is hope, where there is laughter there is life, nobody dies laughing. He is currently working with two coauthors on a book on men’s mental fitness, Guts, Grit, and the Grind.
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