Wellness & Well-being Highlights August 25th
Wellness & Well-being Highlights
for the
Week of August 25, 2025
This week’s edition of our Worker Wellness & Well-being blog looks at if AI improves efficiency or increases burnout—to how men’s behavior impacts birth rates—to whether or not online skill certificates lead to better pay. This week I would like to take a closer look at the video linked below.[1]
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to attend a webinar led by Dr Anna Mueller at the U of Indiana. She is the co-author of a fairly new book: Life under pressure. As we begin a new school year, I highly recommend this read for K-12 educators and parents. Dr Mueller takes us on a journey that explores the pressures our school children face both inside and outside of their schools. As a member and co-chair of the Missouri Suicide Prevention Network’s Postvention Committee, I read this book months ago when I first heard about it. In short, Dr Mueller and her colleague were invited to study the concept of suicide contagion in a small midwestern community. Their research digs into the culture of that community and how it plays a serious role in the matter at hand. These professors perform interviews and focus groups with educators, parents, and students in this town. Their findings cover suicide prevention, intervention, and, much to my surprise, postvention.
Dr Mueller highlighted parts of her book in the aforementioned webinar. Below is a brief overview of her summary, that we ALL should take note of:
The social connectedness, mental health stigma, and homogeneous and narrow cultural beliefs in this small town generated intense pressure for youth and families, schools, and the community to uphold these ideals that felt inescapable.
As such, this resulted in:
*Increased psychological pain
*Suppression of help-seeking
*Poor postvention and problematic memorialization practices
Which combined to expand the interpretation of suicide as a means to escape the oppressive context and, therefore, amplified vulnerability to suicide.[1]
Hopefully, you can foresee how that these findings might be applied to the workplace and have similar ill effects! Next month is Suicide Prevention Awareness month across the globe. With nearly 800k (~50k in the USA) people dying by suicide last year, let’s start planning today how we can become effective change agents!
Please check out the rest of this week’s blog: https://moworksinitiative.org/category/worker-wellness-news/
Source: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-treWmPgO3s
AFSP / Bechtel / Suicide Prevention
Psychological Injuries & WP Harassment
Women Writing Construction’s Next Chapter
Change & Compassionate Communication
Suicidal Ideation: What to Say
Americans & Reading for Pleasure
Trump Cancels Union Contracts (1)
Trump Cancels Union Contracts (2)
Trump Cancels Union Contracts (3)
Gutting Dept of Ed & Research Impact
National Guard Patrolling DC Streets
K-8 School Enrollment & Anxiety
HR / Parents / Back to School Help
Upcoming webinars, etc.:
Strategies for Rural Suicide (8/26)
Mates in Mind: World Suicide Prevention Day (9/10)
PreventEd’s Teen Institute (11/13-16)
NAMI: Back to School Resources
Firearms & Suicide (All Tuesdays in Sept)
Life Under Pressure: A Mueller w/ M Gladwell
NOTE: The links provided above are for informational purposes only. None of these serve as a substitute for medical advice one should obtain from his/her own primary care physician and/or mental health professional. Please contact jgaal@moworks.org with related questions or comments.
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