Suicide Prevention in Construction: What Safety Professionals Can Actually Do | Risk Matrix Episode 154

Risk Matrix #154: Suicide Prevention in Construction: What Safety Professionals Can Actually Do

“Check your ladder, check the scaffold, check on your people.”

Safety professionals are trained to recognize hazards, evaluate risk, and intervene before someone gets hurt. Suicide prevention presents a different challenge. The warning signs may be less visible, and the person recognizing them is rarely qualified to diagnose or treat what is happening.

The issue is drawing increased national attention. Recent proposed federal legislation would direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to further study suicide among construction workers, including the factors contributing to the industry’s high suicide rate.

In this episode Dr. Logan F. Martin and James Junkin discuss suicide prevention in the construction industry and the role safety professionals can play without trying to become mental health professionals. They examine workplace and personal stressors, warning signs that someone may be struggling, and practical steps employers and safety professionals can take to connect workers with qualified support.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Safety professionals need to recognize warning signs without trying to diagnose them. Changes in job performance, increased errors or safety incidents, withdrawal from coworkers, increased drug or alcohol use, reckless behavior, agitation, hopelessness, or statements about feeling trapped or being a burden can indicate that someone is struggling. Not every change signals a mental health crisis, but noticeable changes in a worker’s behavior or performance should not automatically be dismissed as an attitude or performance problem.
• Asking if someone is okay is only the beginning. Dr. Martin describes a practical approach for safety professionals: ask, listen, connect, and follow up. That can mean knowing how to access an employee assistance program (EAP), involving human resources, connecting a worker with a counselor or crisis resource, or knowing who to call when immediate help is needed. The safety professional’s responsibility is not to provide counseling. It is to recognize when someone may need help and know how to connect them with people qualified to provide it.
• Suicide prevention also requires looking at the conditions surrounding the worker. Construction workers can face long hours, workforce shortages, physical demands, heat, sustained pressure, financial strain, time away from family, and difficult workplace relationships. Those pressures can compound challenges workers are already carrying outside of work. Employers cannot control every stressor in an employee’s life, but they can examine whether workplace conditions are adding unnecessary pressure and ensure resources such as EAPs are more than a policy in a manual or a phone number employees do not know how to use.

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