Weathering the Perfect Storm: Suicide in Construction and What the Industry Can Do to Help

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Slide, Image, A construction worker poses in an orange vest and a yellow hard hat. Text, Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention. Text, Greg Sizemore.

GREG SIZEMORE: When you look at the demographics of the workforce, but when you do look at those demographics along with the cultural and psychosocial circumstances of construction workers, they potentially have a perfect storm of suicide risk factors.

And

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Slide, Potentially a perfect storm of suicide risk factors. Image, A construction worker in a neon green vest carries two long brooms over his shoulder in a downpour of rain.

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what I mean by that is the predominance of construction workers have very similar demographics, and to a broader extent they are a higher risk population. For example, construction workers are mostly white males. Again, males most likely die by suicide as opposed to women. With the average age above 40 and increasing at a faster rate than the average age of other workers in the US, suicide is highest among that individual or that group of individuals.

Construction workers have a higher prevalence of both acute and chronic muscular pain. For example, if your higher rate of 42 to 47 years old, then you can't perform as well or you're coping with pains that may have happened in your earlier years. And studies on both construction workers and other working populations have demonstrated that mental distress is strongly associated with that musculoskeletal pain.

Add to that fact that most construction workers have at least one chronic condition. You can consider the construction industry as also attractive to veterans, and that's both men and women. They have transferable skills that the construction industry needs at a very rapid intake pace. Given the impact of PTSD or post-traumatic stress disorders, many lack treatment. And in some cases, they even lack access to treatment and wrestle with the impact of PTSD every day.

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Slide, Tackling this problem head on. Image, One construction worker puts his hand on the shoulder of another as they both sit down. Speaker, Jerry Oiumet.

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JERRY OUIMET: So we're currently on a journey to try to improve the mental health and well-being of our 4,000 employees and their families.

And so what we try to do is mirror the support that we've given safety and quality into the mental health and well-being, as well as trying to tackle the problem in a few ways. One is we're naming the problem. So we are sitting, and we've tracked the number of suicides within our workforce and within our families over the past decade. And we're able to talk to our folks about that.

We have the ability to explain to our workforce that you're five times more likely to have a suicide in construction than you are a fatality on a job site, which gets their attention. And then because of the other training that, we do we do something as simple as CPR training, which when you talk to your workforce about, they know they're not are doing CPR on themselves, but they understand it's a very important training to have.

So we qualify our training and discussions around suicide as something to help them, help their families, and help their coworkers as they go forward. So we started this a few years ago by talking through and raising awareness around the issue. And we've just completed, we had a speaker from the American Foundation come to our leadership meeting back in March.

We've actually had those same speakers and that same support group with Talk Saves Lives go through all of our regional meetings, all the way down to the foreman and supervisor level, including all of our property project managers and engineers. And so now we'll roll that out to our entire workforce.

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GREG SIZEMORE: At CIASP, we're encouraging contractors, labor unions, industry associations, industry service providers, and project owners to go to our website at preventconstructionsuicide.com and take the pledge.

Now, you may ask yourself, what is that pledge about? Well, it is a pledge to stand up for suicide prevention. The pledge centers around these five words, number 1, making it safe as to discuss and ask for help. Jerry said something that I don't want the audience to miss. He put a name to this, he put a name to this, making it safe for someone to discuss and ask for help.

Making suicide prevention training available, toolbox tools. Those types of things. Raising awareness by sharing this message with your entire workforce, including their family members. Normalizing the topic as a health and safety priority as a safety professional. For decades, our focus on the physical safety of our workforce. But now it's time for us to look under the hard hat, behind the glasses, who's standing in those boots? Who's wearing that high vis? And all of that focused on decreasing the risk by making sure that all team members have access to support.

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Slide, Safe, Training, Awareness, Normalize, Decrease. Image, A sign on a large bridge. Text, Life is worth living. Lifeline 24 hour hotline phone ahead. Life is worth living.

Listeners can go to preventconstructionsuicide.com to get more details, take the pledge, and take advantage of all of the resources that we've got out there from toolbox talks, to assessments, to a resources for some of our partners out there who are providing education in this space. Dan, here's what it does. It boils down to this, ignoring mental health and suicide does nothing to address the challenge that we are facing.

And again, I want to go back to what wisdom Jerry said, at Ames, they've named it. And it is our responsibility, not someone else's to address this problem. It can be as simple as making mental health or suicide a regular topic within your ongoing safety or wellness training and discussions, or maybe introducing it, as I said, as a toolbox talk or a daily huddle.

This is about equipping and empowering supervisors and other workers on this subject and how to recognize the risk factors. They need to learn their role to help create a supportive environment, and make it more likely that an individual, one of their peers, or their coworkers, or heaven forbid their son, their daughter, their loved one, their spouse, can get the help they need.

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Slide, Holistic approach to the injured employee. When you are looking at an injured employee holistically, it is critical to put them at the center of everything you do. Image, A man stretches out an exercise band with his hand.

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As a leading insurer, we are committed to increasing awareness of suicide by connecting businesses to the resources that can help them. And we're a very proud sponsor of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention, CIASP. But I want to say that at the desk level, our nurses and our claim professionals are always looking beyond the physical injury that may bring one of our contractors claims to us.

And in fact, just the other day, one of our nurses had received a voicemail at the end of the day, and this was a voicemail message from a physical therapy office that indicated that one of our construction customers, injured employees had been in distress and they thought she might be a suicide risk. So they left us a voicemail after sending her home and wanted us to know about it.

So our nurse got on the phone right away, tried to find the employee. And after a number of calls, she was able to reach the employee. She assessed that, indeed, this individual was at risk for suicide. She had made a plan to kill herself that evening, that night. So she immediately connected on a three-way call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. And through that action, was able to get emergency services to where the employee was.

They took her to the hospital. She was admitted that evening and treated, and later she was released. So a life was saved because of our caring nurses persistence. And she was able to connect an individual who was in their very worst time of need with the right resources. So caring and connecting to the right resources is something we can all do, and it's something that we're proud that this nurse was able to do for this woman.

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Slide, Closing Thoughts. Image, Three construction workers in vests hard hats and glasses stand together and smile.

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GREG SIZEMORE: Issue, like any challenge that we face, will not be solved by simply ignoring. It will not go away because you fail to admit mental health and suicide in the construction industry is an issue. I want the listeners to understand, that on a national level, we can raise awareness.

But the real work needs to take place in their company, on their projects, in their community, in their state, right in their own zip code. At the core, the construction industry and the millions of talented men and women that make up our workforce are problem solvers. Every day, we deal with a variety of challenges. We do that on projects large and small across America and around the world.

If we approach this suicide in construction as problem solvers, as challenge overcomers, if we do the work, if we put in the time, if we are willing to roll up our sleeves and willing to sometimes get dirty doing it, we will make a difference and we will create a zero suicide construction industry. Let me drive this home a little bit more. If it was your loved one, exhausted at a place so dark, dark enough to consider their only relief was to end it all, you'd want somebody to recognize, to intervene, and to get them to the help they need.

Dr. Iglesias shared an incredible story about an intervention that saved someone's life. Jerry shared with us, naming it is absolutely critical. It is time for the construction industry to address this person by person, job site by job site, from the C-suite to the concrete. It is time for you and I to take a stand against suicide in the construction industry.

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Slide, Closing Thoughts. Image, Three construction workers in vests hard hats and glasses stand together and smile.

JERRY OUIMET: Suicide is preventable with early intervention. So we can make a difference. It doesn't have to be like this.

And that tough work done by tough people means that we probably just need to change the culture and care enough to connect people to resources like Dr. Iglesias said. So if we agree that employees are our greatest asset, which they are and should be, then it's a matter of what are we going to do from that. And we need to make it a priority. We need to build a team of others within the organizations to support that. We need to start the conversation. And we need to increase awareness and reduce the stigma around this.

Mental health is something that, they say 20% of people are dealing with at any one point in time. I think that number is probably very low. So the challenges and the stresses of the world are such that people struggle through it. So if we define the challenge, we come up with a solution, and we can connect people to the available resources. We can really make a difference.

The good news is, we don't have to invent all the resources. The resources are there. So it's a matter of showing people where that is. I don't have to learn everything I need to know about CPR. I can tap in and get CPR training and roll it out to the workforce, and hopefully never have an issue. We view mental health and suicide prevention the same way.

So the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, the National Council for Mental Being and Workplace Mental Health, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, we've embraced the QPR, the question persuade and refer training, as well as living works training. All those are available. You can go to the CIASP website and look at available resources that anyone can access locally across the country.

And there's great people with a passion to help us. Those are the resources. We just have to connect the people who are challenged to the people with the solutions. And that's what construction is. So if we can get it down to that foreman, superintendent level, we can get it out to our craft workers, or operators, or carpenters, or foreman, everybody else. In every meeting and every conversation, just make sure everybody is OK and let them know it's OK not to be OK.