Frank King

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

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

Healing hearts with humor one ticker at a time.

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

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.

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

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, a 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 or 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 a 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.