Five Toolbox Talks for Construction Suicide Prevention Week
The week runs 14 to 18 September. Five topics, one per day, the four lines a foreman needs, and what to do after Friday.
If you need help right now: call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time, free and confidential), or text HELLO to 741741.
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
We wrote these five. They are ours, they are free, and the full text of every one is further down this page. They are in the same format Nyfty uses for every toolbox talk: a section per idea, the points a foreman needs to make, and a Key Points page to close on. The topics follow the themes in the Construction Suicide Prevention Partnership’s library, which has 19 topics in English and Spanish and is worth your time for the other fourteen.
- Monday. Suicide Prevention: Why It Belongs in a Toolbox Talk. The figures, and the conditions on a jobsite that sit behind them.
- Tuesday. The Words We Use. Why died by suicide and not committed, and what the trade's idea of tough has cost it.
- Wednesday. How to Ask. The four lines, and what to do if the answer is yes. If your foremen only ever run one of these, this is it.
- Thursday. Where to Send Someone. 988, the text line, and getting your own EAP number onto the board where people can see it.
- Friday. Money and Mental Health. Financial pressure as a site safety issue, and the one people are least likely to raise.
Download the five talksEspañolPortuguês
Sixteen pages each. Hand it to a superintendent and it runs itself. Prints on A4 or Letter.
The Spanish and Portuguese packs are localised rather than translated. The route to help is not the same in each language: Spanish speakers press 2 on 988 or text AYUDA to 988, while 988 serves Portuguese by interpreter on a voice call only, with no text or chat. Each pack says what is actually true for the person holding it.
The Five Talks
How to Use These Talks
This pack contains five toolbox talks, one for each day of Construction Suicide Prevention Week, 14 to 18 September 2026. Each talk runs about five minutes. They are free to copy, print and use on any project, and no software is required to run them.
No training or qualification is needed to present them. The person delivering the talk is not being asked to counsel anyone. The purpose is to raise the subject out loud, in front of the crew, so that it stops being unmentionable on site.
- Deliver them in person: These talks work when a superintendent or foreman presents them face to face. A message on a phone does not carry the same weight.
- Read the content as written: The wording on sensitive points has been chosen deliberately. Improvising around it tends to soften the parts that matter most.
- Leave time at the end: Do not close the huddle the moment the talk finishes. The useful conversations usually start after the speaker stops.
- Prepare the site-specific fields first: Two talks require your own Employee Assistance Program details. Look them up before presenting rather than guessing at them.
Suicide Prevention: Why It Belongs in a Toolbox Talk
The Number Behind This Talk
In 2021, 5,213 construction workers in the United States died by suicide. That is more than five times the number of construction workers who died from injuries on the job in the same year.
The construction suicide rate was 46.06 per 100,000 workers, against 19.47 across all industries. Construction accounts for 7.4 percent of the workforce and 17.9 percent of all worker suicide deaths. These figures are published by NIOSH and the CDC.
Every project has a system for the second number. Pre-use inspections, barricades, pre-task plans, incident reviews, corrective actions. The first number, on most sites, gets a poster. This week is about closing that gap by five minutes a day.
Why This Industry Carries More of It
The conditions the research points to are ordinary on a jobsite rather than unusual:
- Intermittent Work: Jobs start and stop, and income stops with them. Uncertainty about the next start date is a constant for large parts of the workforce.
- Time Away From Home: Following the work means long stretches away from family, routine and the people who would otherwise notice a change.
- Chronic Pain: Physical work produces injury, and injury brings long-term pain management, which carries its own well-documented risks.
- A Culture of Not Saying: The expected answer to how are you doing has been fine, regardless of what is actually true. That expectation is learned on site and it is reinforced daily.
The risk is not spread evenly across the trades. Among male construction workers in 2021, ironworkers were at 117.89 per 100,000 and welders at 87.03, against a construction average of 46.06. Workers aged 55 to 64 were also above the industry average, which cuts against the assumption that this affects younger workers only.
Discussion
Do not press for answers on the first day. Put the subject on the table and let it sit. If the crew says nothing, that is itself worth naming before moving on.
Key Points
The Words We Use
Language Decides Whether People Speak Up
The phrase committed suicide is inherited from criminal language. Offences are committed. Clinical bodies, public health agencies and crisis services now use died by suicide, and the reason matters on a jobsite.
A worker who believes that what he is feeling makes him a criminal or a coward will say nothing. A worker who understands it as something that happens to people, and that has a response, has a reason to speak. The change in wording costs nothing and it changes who talks.
Redefining Tough
The trade's working definition of tough has been to carry it privately and get on with the job. Applied to physical work that definition has served the industry well. Applied to this, it has cost it people. A more useful definition for a crew:
- Tough Is Saying It First: A worker who tells his crew he is not doing well takes a harder action than lifting a heavy load, and takes a real social risk doing it.
- Tough Is Asking: Raising the subject with a workmate is uncomfortable and carries the risk of getting it wrong. It is also the action most likely to change an outcome.
- Tough Is Staying: Sitting with someone through a difficult conversation, without trying to solve it, is harder than offering advice and considerably more useful.
Discussion
Ask the crew whether anyone has ever told someone at work that they were struggling, and what the response was. If nobody answers, say so plainly and move on. Silence on that question is the point of the talk.
Key Points
How to Ask
The Barrier Is Not Caring
Most workers say they would step in if they believed a workmate was in trouble. Most do not. The reason given is consistently the same: not knowing what to say, and fear of making the situation worse.
No qualification is required for what follows. The sequence below is four steps long and any member of a crew can use it.
The Four Lines
- Name What You Noticed: State the observation, not the conclusion. You have not been yourself the last couple of weeks, rather than what is wrong with you.
- Ask Directly: Are you thinking about suicide. Asking a person directly does not put the idea in their head. That belief is a myth and it is the most common reason the question never gets asked. The usual response to being asked is relief.
- Listen Without Fixing: Do not fill the silence, offer solutions, or move the conversation to your own experience. Let the answer be as serious as the person says it is.
- Give Something Concrete: The 988 number, the Employee Assistance Program number, a lift to an appointment, or time off the tools. A specific next step is worth more than an offer to talk any time.
If the Answer Is Yes
Do not leave the person on their own, and do not treat the conversation as finished because it was difficult.
- Stay With Them: Remain with the person while arrangements are made. Being alone immediately after disclosing is the situation to avoid.
- Make the Call Together: Call or text 988 with them rather than handing over a number and walking away.
- Escalate the Same Day: Notify your supervisor or safety lead so that support continues past the end of the shift. This is a handover, not a breach of confidence.
Discussion
Ask the crew to consider who on this site they would go to if they noticed someone going quiet. They do not need to answer out loud, but they should leave with a name in mind.
Key Points
Where to Send Someone
Know the Numbers Before You Need Them
The previous talk covered how to raise the subject. This one covers where to direct a person afterwards, so that the conversation does not stall at the point it matters most.
Before presenting this talk, write both crisis numbers and your own Employee Assistance Program number on the site board, and leave them there permanently.
Crisis Support
- 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 from anywhere in the United States, any time of day or night. It is free. A trained counsellor answers and talks the situation through. It can also be used by someone who is worried about another person and does not know what to do.
- Crisis Text Line: Text HELLO to 741741 to have the same conversation entirely by text, for anyone who will not make a phone call.
Your Employee Assistance Program
Most workers on most sites cannot name their Employee Assistance Program number. That is a failure of communication by the employer, not a failure by the workforce, and this talk is the opportunity to correct it.
Site-specific: read out your organisation's EAP provider and phone number, how many sessions are covered at no cost, and what your written policy states about privacy. Read the policy as written rather than paraphrasing it.
Site-specific: if your organisation is prepared to stand behind it, state plainly that seeking help does not affect a worker's position here.
Discussion
Have the crew save 988 into their phones before the huddle breaks up. Wait while they do it. A number saved before it is needed is the entire point of this talk.
Key Points
Money and Mental Health
Financial Pressure Is a Site Safety Issue
When workers are asked what is weighing on them, money is raised ahead of almost anything else. Not the hours and not the work itself. Rent, a vehicle payment, a bill that has landed, child support, or a gap between jobs that has run longer than planned.
Financial pressure disrupts sleep. A worker who is not sleeping is a worker with degraded judgement, slower reactions and reduced hazard awareness on site the following day. On that basis alone this belongs on the same list as every other topic covered at a toolbox talk.
Workers in this trade will discuss almost anything before saying that they are short this month. The shame attached to it is disproportionate, and in most cases the cause is not anything the worker did.
What to Do
- Use the EAP Early: Employee Assistance Programs generally cover financial counselling alongside mental health support, on the same number. It is designed to be used before a situation becomes a crisis.
- Raise It With the Office: Payroll errors, hours disputes and delayed payments are fixable problems that workers routinely absorb in silence. Raise them rather than carrying them.
- Watch for the Quiet One: A worker who has gone quiet on the drive in is not necessarily quiet about the work. Changes in mood, withdrawal from the crew and uncharacteristic irritability are worth noticing.
Discussion
Close the week here. Confirm to the crew that these talks will continue at least monthly rather than stopping at the end of September, and that the numbers stay on the board.
Key Points
Written by Nyfty.ai and free to copy, print and use on any project. The topic set follows the themes in the Construction Suicide Prevention Partnership's toolbox talk library, which carries 19 topics in English and Spanish at constructionsuicideprevention.com. Figures are from NIOSH and the CDC, Suicides Among Construction Workers in the United States, 2021, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2021.
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.
- Name what you noticed, not what you think it means. “You have not been yourself the last couple of weeks.”
- 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.
- Listen. Do not fix it, do not fill the silence, do not tell them about your cousin.
- 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. These five plus the Partnership’s library gets you well past a year of Tuesdays, and it costs ten minutes a month.
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.