February 2026 Yon Hardisty

Issue #20: Humans Helping Humans

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Intentional Thriving

In a year of all things artificial intelligence, we nod our hat to the advancements in truly remarkable technology. Knowing that this new innovation is advancing faster than anyone could have imagined, we can't stop thinking about how we got here, and who got us here.

Humans.

Humans are still at the core of innovation. Humans helping humans is still the best way to create empathy, connection, and trust. Maintaining a connection with intent and purpose is crucial to our overall mental well-being and key to thriving.

Speaking of thriving, March is here, and so is something we've been quietly building for a long time. This month, we're launching Healthtek Peer Support, a way to connect your employees, volunteers, and members with real human beings who actually listen, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, no login required.

In this issue, we're taking a step back to answer a simple question: why now? Why does peer support matter more in 2026 than it ever has? And why are industries like construction, healthcare, retail, and the nonprofit sector — each for their own painful reasons — desperately in need of something more than a phone number to call?

We'll get into all of it. Including some stats that will probably make you put down your coffee. And we'll tell you about two organizations already using this solution and the lives they are quietly changing as a result

So let's dive in.

​
Yon Hardisty

In this issue:

The Help Line Nobody Calls Hard Hats And Heavier Hearts More Focus Needed on Suicide Postvention Programs What it Looks Like When Support Works

Launching March 2026 Healthtek Peer Support

Human support for every moment that matters.

Meeting your people where they are, whenever they need it, so your organization can thrive from the inside out.

When your employees need support, they need it now-not next week, not during business hours. Healthtek Peer Support quickly connects them with trained Support Advocates, 24/7/365, using our peer network or add your own peer teams.

Why Peer Support?

1. Rapid Response: Fast connection time when stress strikes, support is instant
2. Peer Network: Offering a flexible peer network or train your own peer support team using Healthek Learning (a Learning Management System)
3. Real Human Connection: Trained Support Advocates, anonymous, no login, not chatbots, or automated responses
4. Confidential & Safe: Judgment-free, anonymous support in a secure environment
5. Flexible Integration: Works standalone or integrates with your Healthtek Hub and Wellness Challenges

The Help Line

Nobody Calls

Why traditional mental health resources miss the people who need them the most

Here is a number that should bother you: only 4 to 6% of people who have access to an wellness programs will ever use them.

That means if you have 100 employees, six of them might pick up the phone. The other roughly 94 either don't know the program exists, don't trust it's confidential, are too embarrassed to use it, or — and this is the most common reason — need help at 11pm on a Tuesday and the program only operates Monday through Friday, 9 to 5.

Mental health crises don't hold office hours. They show up during a night shift. They show up after a long week on a job site. They show up on a Sunday when everything feels unbearable and there's nothing to do but sit with it.

That's the fundamental problem with most workplace mental health programs: they're designed for people who are mildly struggling on a weekday. They're not built for the 2am moments, the sudden spirals, the quiet desperation that doesn't announce itself in advance.

The other problem is trust. A lot of people especially in blue-collar industries, in healthcare, in front-line service work, have been taught their whole careers that asking for help is a sign of weakness. They're not going to call a hotline. They're not going to fill out a wellness survey. But they might talk to someone who gets it. Someone who's been through something similar. Someone who isn't taking notes or filing a report.

That's the idea behind peer support. Not clinical. Not bureaucratic. Just a real human being on the other side of a screen, ready to listen.

What the Research Actually Says

The data on peer support isn't theoretical anymore. When people receive support from someone with lived experience, someone who has walked through the same kind of darkness they're more likely to keep talking. More likely to take the next step. More likely to still be here next week.

Peer support models have been shown to reduce emergency room visits, reduce hospitalizations, and increase treatment engagement. They work particularly well in communities where stigma is high and trust in traditional healthcare is low which is a description of nearly every sector we work with.

The good news and the frustrating news are the same: we know what helps. The problem has never been a lack of knowledge. It's been a lack of access.

That's what Healthtek Peer Support is designed to fix.

Join a Wellness Challenge

By Downloading the App

Where iPhone or Android App Store Search +Health Challenges Download Press Download Create A Username and Password

+Health Wellness Challenges helps you build lasting health habits through simple, effective challenges you can share with the people who matter most. The public app is FREE, so what are you waiting for, go download the app today.

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Nutrition Basics:

Teaching Youth Early for Long-term Wellness

Healthy eating habits develop gradually, shaped by daily routines, family culture, school environments, and the examples set by adults. From an early age, children learn what food means by watching how it’s talked about, prepared, and enjoyed around them. When nutrition is introduced as a practical life skill rather than a set of rules, it becomes something children can carry with them as they grow.

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Hard Hats

And Heavier Hearts

The Mental Health Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight on Construction Job Sites

I'm currently at the Construction Mental Health conference in Portland, Oregon. This conference places emphasis on suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention. You may be asking why we are so focused on the Construction industry. It's because people are dying at an alarming rate. If you want to understand how bad things have gotten in the construction industry, consider this: in 2022, approximately 6,000 construction workers died by suicide. That same year, around 1,000 died from on-the-job accidents.

Read that again. Six times more workers died by suicide than from all construction fatalities combined.

We believe the data in 2025 will be much higher.

The construction industry has spent decades perfecting safety protocols to prevent falls, electrocutions, and equipment accidents. Hard hats. Steel-toed boots. Safety harnesses. OSHA compliance. All of it important. All of it saving lives. And yet the leading cause of death for construction workers has nothing to do with any of those things.

The construction industry's culture of toughness — the same culture that produces reliable, resilient, talented workers — has become its own liability. Asking for help on a job site carries social weight it shouldn't. You're supposed to be strong. You're supposed to push through. You figure it out or you keep it to yourself.

A 2025 study surveying more than 2,000 construction workers found that 64% had experienced anxiety or depression in the past 12 months. That's a 10-point jump from the year before. The crisis isn't getting better. It's getting worse.

Why Peer Support Works Differently Here

The construction industry has a characteristic that makes traditional mental health resources nearly useless: the workforce is mobile. Workers move from site to site, city to city, job to job. They don't have a consistent HR department. They don't have a therapist who knows their situation. And they certainly aren't going to call an 800 number to talk to a stranger.

But they will talk to someone who has driven a truck, poured concrete, or worked a 14-hour shift. Someone who knows what it feels like when the project goes sideways and the pressure to deliver becomes crushing. Someone who has been through a divorce or a substance problem or just hit a wall and didn't know what to do.

That's the peer support difference. It's not clinical. It's human.

The good news: things are moving. Drug overdose deaths among construction workers dropped 28.8% in 2024, driven in large part by reduced stigma and expanded peer support and recovery programs. The suicide rate dropped too — modestly, by 1.7%. Progress that took years of work.

The goal for 2026 is to accelerate that progress. Not just with awareness campaigns. With access.

Healthtek Peer Support can be integrated into a company's existing Healthtek Hub or run as a standalone platform — meaning it goes wherever the workers are, available on any device, no login required, completely anonymous.

For an industry where many workers don't trust institutions, the anonymity piece is everything.

More Focus Needed on Suicide Postvention Programs

When someone dies by suicide, the people left behind enter a kind of grief that is unlike anything else.

It isn't just the loss. It's the questions without answers. The guilt that arrives uninvited and refuses to leave. The replaying of last conversations, last moments, last chances to say something different. Other grief comes with a narrative — an illness, an accident, an age. Questions without answers. Into that void steps something that standard condolences and grief pamphlets were never built to address.

Each suicide death directly affects an average of five family members — and touches up to 135 people in the surrounding community.

This is where the word "postvention" matters. It refers to the support provided to people after a suicide loss, the structured, intentional response to help survivors grieve without becoming the next person in crisis. Because that risk is real: losing someone to suicide is itself a documented risk factor for suicidal thoughts and behaviors in those left behind.

And yet, in most communities, postvention barely exists. There is no standard protocol for a hospital to follow up with a family after a suicide death. No automatic referral. No outreach. Many families describe their first contact with any institution after the loss as a billing statement.

The mental health system was not built for this. Waitlists stretch for weeks. General grief counselors are often not trained in suicide bereavement specifically — and this grief requires specific understanding. Studies show that 94% of suicide loss survivors say they needed professional support. Fewer than half received it. A recent study shows that only around 10% of funding is spent on postvention support.

The people who most need help are left to find it themselves, during the worst weeks of their lives.

What actually helps — what research consistently points to — is peer connection. Talking to someone who has been through the same kind of loss. Someone who doesn't flinch, doesn't offer hollow comfort, and doesn't need it explained. That kind of human contact, available quickly after a loss, changes outcomes.

This is the gap that organizations, healthcare systems, and employers can step into. Not with a hotline number buried in an employee handbook. With real, accessible, human support that shows up before the family falls through the cracks.

The families who survive a suicide loss deserve more than silence and a pamphlet. They deserve to be met where they are — immediately, honestly, and by someone who genuinely understands what they're carrying.

What it Looks Like When Support Works

Meet two organizations already using Healthtek Peer Support to change lives.

It's easy to talk about peer support in the abstract. It's harder — and more important — to show what it looks like when it's actually in use.

Two of our partners, LIVIN Foundation and Smiles for Jake, have been early adopters of Healthtek Peer Support. They're nonprofits doing the kind of work that the world needs and rarely funds adequately — suicide prevention, grief support, mental health advocacy. Their teams deal with heavy content every single day. And they've learned something that a lot of organizations haven't admitted yet: the people doing the supporting need support too.

LIVIN Foundation

LIVIN Foundation exists to break down the stigma around mental illness. Their message — "It Ain't Weak to Speak" — has reached hundreds of thousands of young people. Their team works in schools, in communities, in spaces where the conversation about mental health is still charged and difficult.

For an organization built around the idea that talking about what you're going through takes courage, having a peer support platform that reflects that same value is a natural fit. Staff and volunteers can reach a trained support advocate at any hour — someone who can hold space for them when the work gets heavy, without judgment, without paperwork, without having to make an appointment three weeks out.

Smiles for Jake

Smiles for Jake was founded after the loss of a young man to suicide. The organization works to support people experiencing mental health challenges and to prevent others from reaching the same crisis point Jake did.

Their work is personal, grassroots, and emotionally demanding. The people running it aren't just administrators — they're advocates, many of whom have their own stories of loss and struggle. Giving them access to peer support means the organization's most valuable resource — its people — stays intact, even on the hard days. Especially on the hard days.

What both organizations demonstrate is something important: peer support doesn't just help the person in crisis. It helps the entire ecosystem around them. When your team is supported, your mission is protected.

How Healthtek Peer Support Works

The platform connects individuals with trained Support Advocates — real people, not chatbots, not automated responses. No login is required. No account to create. Completely anonymous.

For organizations, there are three ways to implement it: as a web-ready tool, as an integrated feature within the Healthtek Hub ($350/month, $250/month for nonprofits), or as part of the +Health Wellness Challenges app. Organizations can also bring us in to train their own internal peer support teams through Healthtek Learning — so your people become advocates for each other.

Available 24 hours a day, every day of the year. Rapid response time when stress strikes. No waiting. No voicemail. No referral required. Simply humans helping humans.

If you want to learn more about how peer support can help your populations, please don't hesitate to reach out.

To your health,

Yon Hardisty