Men’s Physical and Mental Health, Wellbeing and Resilience
By Peter Broadbent
After 28
years training in the WHS arena, I have clearly seen that men make up the
majority of our Backsafe and Mindsafe attendees. You may say, obviously, but
after training hundreds of thousands of office, rail, transport, warehouse,
building and civil construction workers, health care and child care workers, I think
I have the experience to know the mental and physical makeup of the modern
worker and the challenges they face.
Yet when you
research the internet for service providers, information and training, or look
through bookshelves of our bookshops and libraries, there is a definite lack of
“real” information that addresses these challenges in straight forward, non-biased
and no “BS” way. In fact, what’s really
needed is a huge amount of reliable, easy to understand and practical information
that focusses on men’s health issues, particularly regarding the number one physical
issue - back injury prevention and the number one mental health issue - mental health
and resilience.
My goal is
to proactively create a healthy, happy and secure society and to contribute to
the well-being of all humans, with a keen interest in the particular needs of MEN.
I am a
father, son and grandson. My old pop, Alf was originally a Yorkshire man, a hard-working
plasterer and my father Charlie followed in his footsteps in the family
business, plastering the walls of wheat silos throughout the wheat and sheep zone
of central NSW. My father went to war in
1939 at 17 years of age to “see the world” and get out of Temora. Luckily, he came back to father me and my
builder brother Mark.
After 5
years in the deserts of the Middle East and in the jungles of Papua New Guinea,
Charlie arrived home and undertook some further training in a veteran’s
improvement program run by the Federal Government to become a carpenter/builder. He carried with him a good dose of PTSD, having
been shot at many times during those young and impressionable years in the hell
of an imperial war. Like many of his
fellow soldiers, he was addicted to booze and army issued non-filtered cigarettes.
Both Charlie and Alf had bad backs to prove that they were in the building
industry and both self-medicated with the amber ale to dull the pain. My
brother and I also developed bad backs over years of working in the building
industry not knowing whence it came.
Let’s face
it a man is a complex and composite being.
He is made up of many intricate parts. In times gone by, men were the
main bread winners in the family but today their partners, sisters and our
daughters, coupled or not, now have to contribute to the earning of a living
like never before. Why? Well that’s the subject for another day. But if we just
consider men for the sake of this article, we can see that their
responsibilities and their gung-ho mental attitude to get the job done for their
family at all costs, is literally costing them their physical health and mental
well-being.
Back
injuries are endemic in our work-a-day world with 8 out of 10 working men
suffering a major debilitating back, neck or shoulder injury at some time in
their early working life. Musculo-skeletal disorders to backs, necks, shoulders
and/ or other joints of the body are everywhere, and I know from personal experience
that the recorded statistics don’t show the true or full picture. Most
hard-working men suffer in silence, grit their teeth and get on with it. But their stoic attitude is ultimately expensive
to their enduring lifestyle.
After I
developed a bad back, and recalling my childhood experiences with a father suffering
from PTSD and associated mental health issues as well as debilitating back
issues, I decided to redirect my working efforts towards solving two major health
and wellbeing issues.
Backsafe in
Australia and the Pacific region was born in 1992 with a bit of guts and
determination and a lot of help from a band of mighty men and women. Today we are one of the most highly regarded pro-active
musculoskeletal prevention training program in the marketplace. We train using an edutainment approach to
engagement and we avoid the death by Powerpoint approach at all times.
Next, we
developed the Mindsafe. An equally
engaging education and training program to make us all safe from our own minds.
We wanted to create a training program that taught executives, staff, family
members and friends how to “live in the right way”. We show how to not get caught up in the
“inner world” of the mind - that labyrinth of the mind and the resultant
psychic trauma that impinges on us all daily – so that people understand how
getting caught up in these mind machinations leads them away from living a good
life with themself, family members and others.
We also wanted
to solve the mental health problem of the current generations that has led to
the over-use of alcohol and drugs and to their daily sufferings to a greater or
lesser degree. My dad’s PTSD was but one symptom to be addressed. After
training so many people I saw firsthand the real travails of man and how over all
we were in deep trouble. I observed the
rising impacts of absenteeism and presenteeism within my client organisations and
when I looked in the faces of my trainees, it didn’t take a brain surgeon to
work that as a species we were on the wrong path and that this path would slowly
lead us to our mental and physical demise.
So, after 8
years of intensive research with my colleague Bede exploring Eastern and
Western philosophy and psychology classics written by very special and gifted,
men and women, and then thousands of hours of work and testing, the Mindsafe
program was born. The goal of this training
and education program is to give people the capacity to take their lives back into
their own hands, to be their own life coach and to walk a well-defined pathway
to a better existence.
Of course, I
could talk all day, and I literally do, about Backsafe and Mindsafe but in this
article I’ll give you a brief summary.
If you want any further information, please feel free to contact me
directly either via E: peterb@backsafe.com.au or M: 0414 460 859.
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