Five Toolbox Talks for Construction Suicide Prevention Week

The Number That Never Makes The Safety Report

In 2021, 5,213 US construction workers died by suicide. That is more than five times the number who died from injuries on the job in the same year.

We know what to do about the second number. There is a whole system for it. Harnesses, barricades, JHAs, stand-downs, an incident review when it goes wrong, a corrective action, a lesson learned. The first number does not have a system. It has a poster in the site office and one week in September.

This year that week is 14 to 18 September, and the theme is Building on Progress.

The progress is real. After years of moving the wrong way, the rate has started to come down. It is also still 46.06 per 100,000 in construction against 19.47 across all industries. Construction is 7.4% of the US workforce and 17.9% of worker suicide deaths. Nobody is calling this solved.

Why This Industry

The research points at things anyone who has worked a site will recognise. Work that comes and goes with the job. Travelling away from home to follow it. Bodies that hurt, and what gets taken for the pain. A workforce that is overwhelmingly male, in a culture where the correct answer to “how are you going” has been “yeah, good” since before any of us started.

The risk is not spread evenly either. In the 2021 figures, ironworkers sat at 117.89 per 100,000 and welders at 87.03, against a construction average of 46.06. Laborers, the largest group, were at 71.15. Men aged 55 to 64 were above the trades average too, which cuts against the assumption that this is a young man’s problem.

All figures above are from NIOSH and the CDC, Suicides Among Construction Workers in the United States, 2021. The on-the-job comparison uses the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries for the same year.

If you are working out where to start, that is the list.

Five Talks, One A Day

All five below come from the Construction Suicide Prevention Partnership’s library. They are free, they are in English and Spanish, and you do not need us or any other software to run them. Print them and read them out.

• Monday. Taking Care of What’s Under the Hard Hat. Sets the week up. What we are talking about, and why it belongs in a safety meeting rather than in an HR email.
• Tuesday. Language Matters, and Redefining TOUGH. “Committed suicide” is language borrowed from crime. “Died by suicide” is what clinicians use now. Changing it costs nothing and it changes how the person listening feels about speaking. Same with tough. The industry’s version has been carry it and say nothing, and plenty of good people have carried it all the way to the end.
• Wednesday. Starting the Conversation. How to ask, and what to do when you get an honest answer. The hard part of this one is the second half.
• Thursday. Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (988). The number, what actually happens when someone calls it, and where your EAP number lives. Worth finding out whether anyone on your site can name that number without looking it up. Put it on the board this week.
• Friday. Money and Mental Health. The one nobody schedules, and the one people are least likely to raise on their own.

The library has 19 topics in it, so treat this as a selection rather than a prescription. Swap any of them for what fits your crews.

The Four Lines

The most common thing foremen tell us about this subject is that they would not know what to say. Fair enough. But the script is shorter than most people expect, and none of it needs a qualification.

1. Name what you noticed, not what you think it means. “You have not been yourself the last couple of weeks.”
2. Ask directly. “Are you thinking about suicide?” Asking does not plant the idea. That myth is the single biggest reason the question never gets asked.
3. Listen. Do not fix it, do not fill the silence, do not tell them about your cousin.
4. Give them something concrete. 988. The EAP number. A lift to an appointment. The knowledge that their job is still there on Monday.

Print those four lines on a card if it helps. They work at a gang box as well as they work in an office.

Who Runs The Talk

This is the part that decides whether the week does anything.

A talk about suicide does not work as a handout. It does not work as an email, and it does not work as a notification on a phone. It works when someone the crew knows says it out loud, standing in front of them.

That is either the GC’s superintendent at an all-hands, or the foreman with his own crew around the gang box. Both work. The second one usually works better, because it is ten people instead of two hundred, and because the foreman is the person they would actually tell.

None of that needs software. If you want the talks delivered and recorded, our Toolbox Talk Agent will do that, and it can run daily for a week like this one. But the delivery is the easy half.

The part that does the work is the two minutes after the talk finishes, when nobody has walked off yet. Someone asks a question they would not have asked yesterday, or someone hangs back by the truck. That does not happen because a message arrived. It happens because a person they respect stood up and made it normal to talk about.

So whatever you run this week, put a person in front of it.

After Friday

Here is the part that decides whether any of this mattered.

Next Monday the banner comes down and the pledge cards go in a drawer. A week is an event. This is not an event problem.

One talk a month for the next twelve months beats five in one week, every time. There are 19 topics in that library. That is a year and a half of Tuesdays, and it costs ten minutes a month.

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If You Need Help Right Now

988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text 988, any time. Free and confidential.
Crisis Text Line. Text HELLO to 741741.

Outside the US, your local crisis line and your company’s EAP are the same two calls.

Sources: NIOSH/CDC, Suicides Among Construction Workers in the United States, 2021. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2021. Toolbox talk topics courtesy of the Construction Suicide Prevention Partnership.