SHD Prevention Merges with BreakingTheCycles.com

SHD Prevention was formed to address alcohol misuse and secondhand drinking in the workplace.I formed SHD Prevention in 2015 to help companies and agencies address something so insidious and pervasive that it is affecting up to 40% of their workforce; a thing so powerful that it could be costing their bottom line hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. That something is secondhand drinking (SHD) and it’s cause – alcohol misuse.

What’s This All About?

Alcohol misuse – binge drinking, heavy social drinking, alcohol abuse, and alcoholism, as examples – costs employers billions of dollars each year. But it’s not just the costs associated with an employee’s alcohol misuse; it’s the cost associated with secondhand drinking.

Secondhand drinking (SHD) is the other side of alcohol misuse. It is the negative impacts of a person’s drinking behaviors on others.

Drinking behaviors are generally not intentional, rather they are what happen when binge drinking, heavy social drinking, alcohol abuse, or alcoholism (alcohol misuse) changes the way a person’s brain works. Drinking behaviors include:

  • verbal, physical or emotional abuse
  • illogical, circular arguments
  • driving while impaired
  • domestic violence
  • committing a crime or sexual assault
  • and other dangerous drinking behaviors
Husbands, wives, children, parents, siblings, grandparents, boyfriends, girlfriends, in-laws, close friends, and co-workers within an employer’s organization are some of the nearly 80 million Americans directly affected by Secondhand drinking. Through contact with people directly affected, millions more also experience secondhand drinking and its physical, emotional, and quality of life consequences. As destructive as the drinking behaviors are to those affected, the problem of secondhand drinking goes far, far deeper. This deeper problem is toxic stress. Toxic stress is what happens when a person’s fight-or-flight stress response is repeatedly triggered – like that which occurs when repeatedly coping with drinking behaviors. The physical and emotional health consequences of toxic stress are described next.

The High Cost of Secondhand Drinking 

By studying the research on alcohol misuse, the primary cause of secondhand drinking, we can extrapolate the high costs of secondhand drinking on a company or agency’s bottom line.  For example, one forestry agency with 9,000 employees faces:

  • an estimated $888,710 in annual cost due to missed work days related to untreated alcohol problems
  • 20 percent of their workforce being injured, covering for a coworker, or having to take on added responsibilities because of other employees’ drinking
  • increased health care costs among employees and their family members related to untreated alcohol problems.

Based on the sheer numbers of employee’s affected, we can estimate the cost of secondhand drinking far exceeds the reported costs of alcohol misuse, primarily as a result of the high levels of stress employees who deal with secondhand drinking, or its ripple effects, often experience. This in turn causes physical, emotional and quality of life consequences, such as:

  • headaches, migraines
  • stomach ailments
  • skin rashes
  • racing heartbeat
  • muscle aches
  • insomnia and other sleep issues
  • changes in eating habits (causing obesity or weight loss)
  • feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, walking on eggshells
  • anxiety, depression
  • difficulty concentrating
  • losing friends, dreading social events.

These physical, emotional and quality of life consequences form the basis of secondhand drinking’s staggering workplace costs related to absenteeism, safety risks, health care, distraction and poor performance.

What’s the cost to your agency or company? Check out The Alcohol Cost Calculator devised by the Center for Integrated Behavioral Healthy Policy, an initiative based at The George Washington University Medical Center.

SHD Prevention Programs Formerly Offered by Lisa Frederiksen

The following SHD Prevention program examples were designed to help employers negate the staggering workplace costs related to employee off-hours alcohol misuse and the ripple effects of both alcohol misuse and secondhand drinking:
Consulting
  • Drafting applicable implementation policies and procedures (e.g., protocols for employees seeking help with a drinking or SHD problem), whether this is additions to an existing alcohol and other drugs’ policy or the development of a new one.
  • Drafting HR policy and procedure language and implementation training for supervisors and key leaders.
  • Creating supplemental products (posters, brochures, pocket guides, social networking messages, other).

Training

  • Innovative Solution to Reduce Workplace Impacts of Alcohol Misuse | Secondhand Drinking
  • Creating Secondhand Drinking Prevention Programs to Meet Company | Agency Needs
  • New Approach to Counter Employee Stress Costs in the Workplace

As of today, SHD Prevention Merges with BreakingTheCycles.com

In order to consolidate my often overlapping efforts between these two sites, I’ve now merged the two. Nonetheless, I still offer these kinds of consulting and training programs to companies and public agencies.

Readers can still access the blog posts from my SHD Prevention site renamed and posted in the BreakingTheCyles.com blog category, Workplace SHD Prevention.

 

 

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