Brain Health: We are funding the issue.

We have two choices for brain disorders:

1. One is to accept the current state as inevitable. Continue funneling our dollars toward critical situations like suicides and breakdowns, which could have been avoided, which leads me to point #2…
2. The other is to redirect those dollars and start addressing the problem at its root.

(keep reading for less doom and more hope)

The Poison: Invisible Smog

If poisonous smog was giving your workers lung cancer, you’d fix it. But what if you couldn’t see the smog and none of your employees were telling you about their symptoms? Or even worse, what if your workers didn’t even know they were sick?

The conversation around brain health is growing, but it’s still a problem very few people understand and almost no one sees.

So we wait….

Until there is a suicide, a breakdown, or some other event that costs us more than addressing the problem from the start. After all, 48% of employees won’t talk about it, and 70% don’t get help.

The Antidote: A Common Touch Point

As a business, you are the biggest lever for change. When a company is changed so people living with brain disorders can live openly, with hope for their future (Sigmend’s mission), it’s a domino effect. You impact individual employees, their children, spouses, and other family members. You impact the day to day life of each of those people, their futures, and the future of your company. Companies who emphasize brain health reap the rewards from recruitment, performance, loyalty, and knowing it’s just the right thing to do.

Want to help us distribute the cure?

We’ve created a Guidebook and Blueprint to help companies both see and understand the problem. The Blueprint is a way for peers across companies to share their stories of their brain health programs. From yoga to health care benefits, it eliminates the guesswork and helps the best services reach the most relevant companies.

“We pride ourselves on continuous improvement of benefits, but the truth is that we select most programs via internal word of mouth, somewhat arbitrarily. It’s hard to know [what resources] are out there and reputable.”

— Colorado People Developer

During Mental Health Month in May 2017 we are calling everyone:

• Vendors of brain health tools, programs, and services (from insurance to meditation)
• Companies who want to share (and show off) things they are doing for brain health
• Government, non-profit, and individuals who want to support brain health

This event will give people an opportunity to talk to providers and see what programs look like in person. We will help individuals create a blueprint for brain health to take to their company to help inform them of the problem and solutions.

Now I know you’re thinking, this sounds amazing! Brain health is so sexy. I get to meet relevant vendors, companies, and you’re going to make it easy for me to redirect my dollars toward prevention.

We’re going to make it sexy with two important lessons during our Design Thinking Workshop at Denver Startup Week.

1. There are a lot of motivated individuals working on brain health in Colorado.
2. It’s tough to compete with the startup crawl.

So we’re making our own crawl in May, a brain health crawl, during Boulder Startup Week (pending Boulder Startup Week approval). Help us show that this is a worthwhile event by Blueprinting your company and becoming an event partner or sponsor.

I promise that redirecting your dollars away from the emergencies and to the root of the problem will be worth it.

I once gave a speech on my experience with a brain disorder to a high school, after which a young woman came up to me crying and told me she’d planned on taking her life on her 18th birthday in less than a week. It amazes me how powerful sharing an experience can be. Which is why, large or small, this event will be a success.

Contact us at hello@sigmend.com to join the May event or to talk to us about your brain health ideas.

First posted on sigmend.com