Wellness & Well-being Highlights December 23

Wellness & Well-being Highlights

for the

Week of Dec 23, 2024

This week’s edition of our Worker Wellness & Well-being blog looks at how a new KC program, REACH, is steering people with Mental Health and SUD issues towards care providers in an attempt to divert them from the criminal justice system—to how pharmacy benefit managers may have played a key role in the US opioids crisis—to how AI is being misused to exploit innocent (often underage) victims. This week I would like to take this opportunity to shed some light on an old behavior with a new name: Cancer Ghosting.¹Basically, this is when someone you know and love informs you of their cancer diagnosis…and, you, in turn, avoid ANY contact with him/her from that point forward. Thus, isolating the cancer victim from his/her support network and possibly causing more damage than the cancer itself!

When I heard this story on NPR earlier this week, I could not help but think of how this concept somewhat applied to me (and my family) after the loss of our oldest son, John Jr, to suicide in March 2017. To be sure, soon thereafter, we would encounter a few long-time friends from the area in the grocery store only for them to do a 180 and high-tail it to another portion of the store in order to avoid contact with us. In general, experts suggests that this behavior is related to those people not knowing what to say or having the fear of saying the wrong thing. If you fall into this category, please take Megan Devine’s advice. She wrote a book on grief a few years back (It’s OK that You’re Not OK) and in the appendix she addressed how to help a grieving friend (What to / not to say). In her words, “Acknowledgement helps make things better even when they cannot be made right.”²

This brings me to my latest research on Suicide Postvention in the Construction Industry. There was a point this fall where I received 8 phone calls over a 12-week period regarding suicides (attempts or deaths). For years now, I have been contemplating why are there so many Suicide Prevention and Suicide Intervention programs available but hardly any focused on Suicide Postvention…especially for the Construction Industry and in, what I call, the First 48 (hours) also known as the acute phase. Those 8 calls moved me to take action. In fact, I just wrapped up the survey phase and am about to enter the interview phase. Hopefully, late spring/early summer of 2025 I will have completed the study and will share a report/action plan with our readers. One thing you can be sure of is that I will definitely address the phenomenon of ghosting during that acute phase of Suicide Postvention…which I will appropriately name it ghostvention!

Sources: [1]https://www.npr.org/2024/12/18/nx-s1-5179011/cancer-ghosting-survivorship-young-survivors [2] https://refugeingrief.com/videos/how-to-help-a-grieving-friend-the-animation

KC’s New MH program

OSHA / PPE Rule / Jan 13

Construction Fatalities Rose in 2023

Opioids Settlement Fund’s Database

PBM’s role in the Opioids Crisis

A Dangerous Substitute for Narcan