Got EAP?

I was just a normal guy.

Life was just a nine to five.

With bills and pressure,

piled up to the sky.



She never asked,

'cause she knew I'd been,

hangin' with my wilder friends.

Lookin' for some other way to fly.



Three days straight was no big feat,

to get by on no food or sleep.

And crazy,

was becoming my new norm.



I'd pass out on the bedroom floor,

and sleep right through the calm before the storm.



[chorus]

My life was just an old routine.

Every day the same damn thing.

I couldn't even tell I was alive.

I tell you,

the high cost of livin',

ain't nothin' like the cost of livin' high.



That Southern Baptist parkin' lot,

was where I'd go to smoke my pot.

And sit there in my pick-up truck and pray.



Starin' at that giant cross,

just reminded me that I was lost.

And it just never seemed to point the way.



As soon as Jesus turned his back,

I'd find my way across the tracks.

Lookin' just to score another deal.



With my back up against that damn eight-ball,

I didn't have to think, or talk... or feel.



[chorus]



My whole life went through my head.

Layin' in that motel bed.

Watchin' as the cops kicked in the door.



I had a job and a piece of land.

My sweet wife was my best friend,

but I traded that for cocaine and a whore.



With my newfound sobriety,

I've got the time to sit and think...

Of all the things I had,

and threw away.



This prison is much colder than,

the one that I was locked up in...

Just yesterday.



[chorus]



I tell you,

the high cost of livin',

ain't nothin' like the cost of livin' high.



...just leave that stuff alone... (quietly during closing instrumental)

Competing to be The Biggest Loser;Got EAP?

Ever spend any time on itunes looking at random app's? I admit I do. I look at the free ones because I'm cheap. Anyhow I run across one called FML and its very popular. I click and look at it to find;

If you’ve never been the website FMyLife, it’s kind of like Twitter for losers who just can’t get a break… people post very short anecdotes about how F’d their lives are, always ending with the abbreviated mantra “FML”, and then the rest of the world votes on whether the person’s life is truly F’d or if they got what they deserved. Here are a few:

There is something sad about a culture that competes to demonstrate how terrible their life is, not too mention how shallow is the individual who lifts himself by tearing down another in the comments section of a website or blog? But we have all seen such individuals. The web has coarsened our national rhetoric. Just another reminder why you need to communicate the access to your EAP.

Mental Health Drives Indirect Absenteeism Costs

HR Web Cafe has a great post today on highlighting mental illness as the leading driver of indirect absenteeism costs for employers according to an Employee Benefit News Survey.

Of interest is that only 12% of employers screen for mental health and primary care providers are not compensated in many cases. Compounding the issue is the fact that managers and supervisors are not trained to recognize at risk employees.

Another reason employees may not be utilizing mental health benefits is that managers do not encourage it. Less than one-fourth of the HR-benefits directors surveyed believe the managers in their companies have an overall understanding of the toll mental health takes on a person and family members. Furthermore, only a third say their companies provide managers with education on mental health issues, and only 15% say they train managers in recognizing mental health problems and directing employees to treatment.

Depression Untreated Got EAP?

On the heels of the VT shootings Houston has seen murder suicides at Johnson Space Center last Friday as well as another murder suicide at an upscale apartment complex yesterday.

On a personal note my own 6 year old niece was spending Sunday evening with her nanny when the nanny's spouse attempted suicide. He had been depressed recently.

60 Minutes ran a very interesting piece Sunday night highlighting similarity between school shooters and presidential assassins.

As 60 Minutes noted;

"With the school attackers that we studied there’s no profile, there’s no set of demographics that they share. But there are certain behaviors that they undertake," Georgeann Rooney, a threat assessment specialist at the Secret Service, tells 60 Minutes.

Behaviors that, she says, are like those of assassins. "This isn’t an individual who just snaps and wakes up and decides they are going to attack their school. There’s a planning process," Rooney says. "This planning, a lot of times, if you know what to look for it can be detectable."

And one theme they detected was bullying: two-thirds of the school shooters were victims of bullies. "They'd call you gay, call you stupid or fat or whatever. Kids would sometimes throw rocks at me and push me and kick me and hit me and stuff like that," Luke Woodham [school shooter]told researchers.

The Secret Service research reads like a road map to the mind of Virginia Tech killer Seung-Hui Cho; he mentioned suicide to others, and he planned for months, buying one of his guns nearly three months before the attack.

HR & Benefit managers are frequently challenged to justify the ROI associated with EAP programs. Yet after every tragic event we are faced with evidence friends, families and co-workers were often aware of a problem manifested in behavior.

Murder is the Number One cause of on-the-job death for women in the workplace and 20% of those women, on average, are murdered by their partner at the workplace (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1993). Here are some tips for managers and supervisors to make your workforce safer

Interdependent Benefits Need An Integrated View

Aetna (NYSE:AET) today announced that employee assistance services will be a standard part of the servicing of fully insured health plans for all small group employers.


Here is a very useful study of Depression in the workplace--warning funded by Pharma--so make sure you have therapuetic infusion baked into your Rx & DM plan design.