Podcast: The silent industrial crisis – the need for mental health awareness
Key Highlights
- Proactive communication tools—not reactive programs—are essential to reducing mental-health crises in construction.
- Certifications like SafeTALK, ASIST, and mental-health first aid help teams identify risks early and respond safely.
- Experiential, hands-on training better equips blue-collar workers to use communication skills in real-world situations.
- Free industry resources and growing cultural momentum make meaningful mental-health progress achievable in coming years.
Discussion around mental health is still rare among industrial workers. It's a cultural issue that needs to be re-examined and made a workplace priority, says podcast guest Stephen Dummit, founder of Tradewinds Leadership.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
AS: Let's start with when and why you first became interested in addressing the issue of mental health in construction.
SD: I have been in professional coaching and facilitating for the past five years full-time and there was a particular instance where I was doing a facilitation for a company and one of the participants in particular was having a very rough go. So much so that he in fact called me on a Friday evening, which I invited him to, I gave him my number, to express to me his anxiety and stress and panic about having to work with a particular teammate at that company on a new job that was starting. And it kind of dawned on me. Why is he reaching out to me? Why is he pouring his heart out to me, which I'm OK with? But why was there no one else at the company that he could express this frustration to? Another teammate? Another manager? Another supervisor, someone higher up in the company.
And that's when it really started to dawn on me that the mental health of a lot of the blue collar side of construction needs to be addressed in a way that it's not being addressed. This particular person was not being given the tools on how to handle this situation, how to process the emotions that he was having. I'm grateful that he was able to reach out to me. But that really kind of opened my eyes that a lot of this training needs to be given to the field, to the crew, to the boots on the ground people, to give them an opportunity to have the tools to process a situation like that.
Couple that with doing a little bit more research as I was in the construction industry, doing coaching, facilitating and starting to read more and more about the suicide stats and the suicide rates that I'm now very familiar with. And this is an industry that I've been in for 15 years. My father was a contractor. I came up being a contractor before I did this. And so this is my industry. And to start realizing that I never knew for the first 30 plus years of my life how bad things were in construction and that I had the opportunity to do something about it.
So that's kind of really what drove home the mental health side of things for me.
AS: We have written at EHS Today for probably the last couple of years about this increasing and alarming rate of suicide in the construction industry and I've seen a lot more about it. However, it doesn't seem to be improving, the statistics come out every year and not much is improved. Why do you think that is?
SD: I think a lot of it has to do with, a lot of the campaigns that I see right now are awareness campaigns. And I think that that's really good and things start with this idea of awareness. But we need to move from awareness to action. What can we do about it? What is the proactive way that we can help prevent people from getting into crisis? If we start looking at what companies are doing right now, they're often reactive approaches. So for example, when we talk about how do we combat the suicide rate, a go-to for a lot of companies I talk to is, “Well, we have an EAP, we lean heavily into our Employee Assistance Program.” I think that EAPS are great. I'm not going to knock EAPs. However, EAPs only work once a person is in crisis. What are the steps that we could take proactively to prevent that person from getting into crisis. What is the culture that they have working with their company? What is the experience they have with their team day in and day out? And what are the tools and practical applications that we can start to affect change there before they get to crisis? Really that comes down to communication skills. How are we able to communicate what is going on in us as a human and not just the project or the task at hand or what needs to be tackled that day?
So I think when we start leaning into proactive approaches instead of just awareness side of things, we can start to hopefully drive that number down so.
AS: OK. In some of the interviews that I've had with people, they are getting a little proactive and they're certifying a number of people on their staff as mental health counselors or contacts. Can you talk a little bit about some of these certifications?
SD: Some of these certifications would include being ASIST certified (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training) or being SafeTALK certified (Tell, Ask, Listen, KeepSafe) or mental health first aid certified. I am all three because I'm passionate about this. And so if we're talking about like mental health first aid, for example, that is a great certification to have, great training to for someone in your company that has that training. That really covers mental health on a broad spectrum from stress to anxiety to panic attacks, potential PTSD from something that occurred earlier in life. Broad spectrum mental health.
When we start getting into the SafeTALK or we get into the ASIST certification specifically, that's more suicide-specific. So SafeTALK is really about having suicide alertness for everybody, and we’re really giving people the tools to recognize what are the beginning stages of someone withdrawing or isolating or starting to act not their normal. And so that we can then learn the tools to tell and to ask and to listen and to keep them safe, right. That's part of the SafeTALK acronym.
ASIST is a little more in depth with it and ASSIST is actually a 2-day training where a SafeTALK is a four hour training and the mental health first aid ends up being about a total of 8 hours training. I think it's about 3 hours of your own work, pre work and then a five-hour course. But with ASIST we're really talking about a deeper dive and how to talk to people that are really in that moment of crisis and potentially with their feet on the ledge, so to speak. And their feet might not be on a literal ledge, but they might be just as close to making a decision they can't come back from and how to talk to that person, how to stay with that person, and how to help talk through what they're going through and how to find out how involved maybe their plan is.
Do they have a plan? What is the outcome? And learning to ask great questions about future things that might reignite that idea of hope or hey tomorrow we could do this or hey, there's this thing to look forward to. Maybe don't take this action today. Let's think about it a little more and at least that gets us safe for the moment. We got them off the ledge today and that might be enough for them to have a turnaround or to realize maybe that's not the ultimate best decision that they want to make.
So having people in your company that are trained this way is great and just having that knowledge and it's even understanding those kind of tools and in your company having that language and sharing that you almost don't have to be a professional when you get in that situation, just don't leave that person alone and have the professional show up. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to fix anything. You don't have to correct anything. Just stay with the person. Just stay with the human. Be a human with them until a professional shows up. And then they can handle the more in-depth things. So those are some kinds of trainings that really that can really help drive this rate down.
AS: I know your company does specific workshops, so can you explain what the strategy is behind them and how that works at a company if they're interested in doing a workshop?
SD: Yes, we do specific workshops. Our theory is that everything is rooted in communication. It's communication tools first. Communication tools allow us to build better connections with all of our people. Better bonds. And when we're doing that, we're starting to share more information. We're starting to share more of those feelings and emotions—what excites us, what is troubling us—that allows us to be more resilient and handle adversity, handle unforeseen change, handle the inevitable, the unknown, the curveballs life is going to throw at us no matter what we do. And when we're more resilient and we have those people that we can rely on and they become a resource for us, we manage our stress better and actually our stress goes down.
We all have that experience of being at home, long day. Maybe it's a spouse, maybe it's a friend, maybe it's someone you're talking to, a mentor, and we just kind of vent about our day for two minutes and the person we vent to has said nothing. How much better do we feel? Our stress just came down.
All of those are markers of improved mental health. So a lot of our workshops all the way around to improve mental health go back to what are the communication tools that people have or don't have, and people don't often think about improving their communication skill set, their tool belt, if you will. They are just trained with what they've learned through their life, through their peers, through their mentors, through their parents, through someone on a job. Maybe it's a supervisor or someone they looked up to. But we can improve our communication tool set just like we can improve anything with a computer or academic. Or we can work on our golf swing and improve our golf swing or any other sport for that matter. Or if we're trying to learn a new language, we can improve our ability to communicate with other humans, which allows us to take that next step into building better connections.
So our workshops are focused on what are the practical communication tools that we can give people, and specifically for the boots on the ground, the blue collar side that aren't often given that opportunity. And I come from construction. I'm an electrician by trade. I started cleaning up job sites, worked all the way up to owning the company and running the jobs. Blue collar are a unique set in that we often learn with these. We learn with our hands. We need to be able to touch it. We almost have to hit our thumb with a hammer to say that's not how you do it. So if you have a blue collar subset of the industry and we're trying to give them these tools, if they're being taught on a computer screen through a module that's not interactive, it's just theory-based. That's not going to help them that much. You need to show them. Let's make it experiential. Here's how I've used the tool. Here's what it does. How is it real to you? Now let's do a 15 minute exercise where you use the tool and with anything with blue collar, once you show them how to use a tool, get out of their way and watch him build a mansion or a skyscraper. So a lot of the workshops that we do are focused in that style of experiential learning and rooted in communication and leadership tools.
AS: So let's take a company that's watching this and says, “I need to do something, I need to start a program. I don't have a ton of resources, but I know it's something important to do.” What are the first steps that they should take?
SD: There are many and they are free and they are available. The first step that I would steer people towards is Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention, CIASP. If you go to their website, they have toolbox talks. They have all kinds of resources. In fact, they have a needs assessment that is free for you to take, that is very quick. It might take you or your company or representative 20 minutes to go through this assessment and it's going to just kind of help highlight where you have gaps, where you could lean into and then give you resources for them. If it's toolbox talks or whatever it is, if it's awareness campaigns, if it's posters for the wall during Mental Health Awareness Month or Suicide Prevention Month, all free.
Another great one that's going to be out there is Construction Suicide Prevention Week. Again, Google them. They're going to have all kinds of free resources, free things you can put out, awareness campaigns. They're going to give you kind of a timeline of how you can post and release these things, how to incorporate them into your tailgate meetings, into your toolbox talks. Again, these are all free.
I would actually invite a lot of people if they wanted to and didn't know where to turn, go to tradewindsleadership.com or find me on LinkedIn, Stephen Dummit, and I would love to have a conversation with you and just point you to all of the resources I have available. And again, these are all free. It's a free conversation. I just want to be a resource for people to help steer them in the right direction.
So there's a lot of information out there. They just need to be a little bit proactive and try to go find it. And if you’ve got nowhere else to go, come find me and I'll steer you the right way.
AS: Are you optimistic that all of the things that you're doing, I know they make an impact on the people that you directly touch, but from an industry, do you see an impact in the next few years or is it going to kind of take another, hopefully not another generation, you know, to solve this?
SD: My personal opinion is that it is going to happen in the next three to five years. I think as we're moving through these generations things happen at a faster and faster rate. Our connectivity, internets, phones, our tools around communication, our devices allow us to communicate at a much broader speed, right? We're no longer putting something in a Pony Express and it takes three weeks for the letter to get across some state divide, right? We can send an e-mail in an instant and it's around the world in in fractions of a second.
So I think with that, where we're going is I think more and more people are going to become champions of this new way of approaching it. And that's really the language that I use and what I look for is who are the people that want to champion this movement and the movement is creating a better culture at work, creating a better experience at work, a better environment at work because we spend a third of our lives if not more there, and people really aren't willing, I think, as much to tolerate it.
I think COVID kind of put a megaphone on our lived experience and people started to say I don't need to work 50-60-70 hours a week. I didn't need to have dual income. We're OK with one. We didn't have to have all these things that society said we had to have. So I think that that influence is pervasive in a good way and I think that that's where really the industry is going to be going. People are not going to want to tolerate it. Our fuse for tolerating things is getting shorter and shorter and shorter in this country specifically. We see that across a vast array of places.
So I think that expediency for doing something different or for change or for creating anew is getting faster and faster. So I think we're kind of past the innovator stage or the early adopter and we’re into the early majority phase, to me that's in three to five years.
About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.
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About the Author
Adrienne Selko
Adrienne Selko is senior editor at EHS Today and Material Handling & Logistics. Previously, she was in corporate communications at a medical manufacturing company as well as a large regional bank. Adrienne received a bachelor’s of business administration from the University of Michigan.