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April 22, 2026
11:30 am - 1:00 pm
Speaker(s):
Kyle Zimmer, Education & Outreach Specialist, Recovery Ways and Brett Lovins Recovery Friendly Workplace Consultant, Sober Curious Consulting.
Topic:
Mental Health and Suicide Prevention
Construction’s Focus Four claimed roughly 1,000 lives in 2023. Suicide claimed 5,000 more. Overdose claimed 15,000. If you’re a safety professional managing only the first number, you’re managing six percent of the problem and staying silent about the rest.
This session challenges safety leaders across construction, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and other high-hazard industries to expand how they define risk. It is not a mental health awareness talk. It is a practical, no-jargon session on how silence shows up in your incident data, what leaders can do about it, and how to get far more value out of resources your organization already has.
- Understand why stress, substance use, and suicide are safety issues not HR issues and how silence drives incidents, turnover, and missed warning signs.
- See the real fatality numbers across high-hazard industries and understand what they mean for how you define and manage risk.
- Learn a practical framework for increasing utilization of existing EAP and MAP resources through high-frequency outreach — including getting the message home to the family
- Walk away with one concrete action to take Monday morning
In 2023, high-hazard industries lost more than 20 times as many workers to suicide and overdose as to the Focus Four combined. These are preventable fatalities and they sit squarely in the safety professional’s lane. ASSP members are positioned to lead this conversation at their organizations. This session provides the framing, the data, and the tools to start.
About the Speakers:
Kyle Zimmer — Education & Outreach Specialist | Recovery Ways
Kyle is the former Director of Health and Safety and Members Assistance Program at the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 478, with more than 30 years of frontline experience in union safety training and peer support.
An OSHA-certified Safety and Health Specialist, Kyle has trained thousands of Operating Engineers and served as a national instructor with the IUOE National Training Fund. He pioneered Local 478’s Members Assistance Program a peer-driven model supporting members and their families through substance use, mental health, and other life challenges and has helped other locals build peer support programs of their own.
Brett Lovins — Recovery Friendly Workplace Consultant | Sober Curious Consulting
Brett is a Recovery Friendly Workplace consultant and person in long-term recovery with more than 12 years of sobriety. As a senior leader at Cisco, Brett built one of the largest grassroots workplace recovery movements in the country driving culture change across 80,000 employees and proving that peer support, done right, functions as workforce infrastructure, not a wellness perk.
He now works with safety leaders, HR professionals, and union organizations to close the gap between awareness and action turning workplace concern about substance use, mental health, and stress into clear, practical steps that reduce risk and save lives.
Brett is based in the Puget Sound area of Washington and will be presenting in person.
We are meeting in person at the LNI offices in Tukwila and offering a virtual option via Zoom.
For those attending in person, the chapter will cover the cost of your meal, but please register accordingly so that we have enough food and a room large enough to accommodate everyone.
For those attending in person, please plan to join us for a lunch at 11:30 AM. We will begin the presentation at 12:00 PM for those attending virtually.
Virtual Option – Join Zoom Meeting
Puget Sound ASSP is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/91728697457?pwd=Mkg1cEFTb01OaHJOaWxJaXFiOXM2QT09
Meeting ID: 917 2869 7457
Passcode: 238605
One tap mobile
+12532158782,,91728697457#,,,,*238605# US (Tacoma)
+16699009128,,91728697457#,,,,*238605# US (San Jose)
Venue: Labor and Industries Tukwila Office
Address: