By Scott Crosby, Turner Construction Company — Huntsville

We can spot a fall hazard from a hundred feet away. We spend our careers learning to see risk: a fall hazard, a missing guardrail, a trench that hasn’t been shored. The construction industry has trained generations of people to catch those dangers before they hurt someone, and it shows. Our job sites are dramatically safer today than when many of the people reading this started their careers.

But there’s a risk we can’t see from across a jobsite, and you likely can’t spot it in your workplace either. We can’t see depression under a hard hat. We can’t see anxiety behind safety glasses. And it’s proving deadlier than any of the safety issues we train the men and women on our jobsite to prevent.

The CDC’s most recent data reports that about 6,000 construction workers die by suicide per year. Roughly 1,000 die from jobsite injuries. That’s six deaths from silence for every one from the hazards we’ve spent decades working to eliminate. The falls, the equipment, the electrocutions, all of it, added together, take fewer of our people than the mental health challenges experienced by those working in our industry.

If another risk were affecting our workforce at that scale, we would respond with urgency. Mental health deserves that same attention.

Some of this is the nature of the work. Long hours. Physical pain that accumulates over years. Time away from family. The boom-and-bust pressure of project schedules.

But much of it is culture, the same culture, ironically, that we had to overcome to make physical safety stick. There was a time when wearing a harness was considered soft. When reporting a near-miss was considered being weak. We changed that. It took years, and it took leaders saying out loud that going home safe mattered more than looking tough. Today, a superintendent who ignores a safety protocol doesn’t look tough to anyone.

We knew how to change what ‘tough’ means in this industry. We built new processes and trained leaders in new ways. In recent years we’ve made strides in better supporting the whole person, but the stats and the impact of ignoring these issues show we need to keep going.

This matters everywhere, but it should matter especially in a city that builds rockets, sequences genomes, and solves problems the rest of the country hasn’t reached yet. A region that calls itself one of the smartest in America shouldn’t be losing its builders to something we know how to address.

So what does that look like in practice? It’s not complicated, and it’s not expensive. At Turner Construction, it looks like toolbox talks that cover mental health with the same seriousness as fall protection. It looks like training supervisors on active caring and noticing when someone’s behavior changes. Notice when the guy who’s suddenly quiet, the one who stops eating lunch with the crew, and ask about it directly. It looks like making sure an employee assistance program is a phone number people actually use, not just a poster on the wall. And it looks like leaders going first: talking about stress, about hard seasons, about getting help, so that the newest apprentice on site knows none of that disqualifies him from being good at this work.

None of that is unique to construction. If you run a business in this region, the odds are that someone on your team is carrying something heavy right now and has concluded that work is the last place to mention it. The question for every employer reading this is the same: have I built a place where asking for help is treated like reporting a hazard? Is reporting encouraged, acted on every time, and never punished?

September gives us two reasons to start. Construction Suicide Prevention Week runs September 14–18, and National Tradesmen Day falls on September 18. We’ll mark both on our local job sites. But I’d challenge my peers across North Alabama, in construction and far beyond it, to mark them too. Stand up in front of your people and say the words. Safety means the whole person.

If you or someone you know is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. It’s free, confidential, and available around the clock.

Scott Crosby, Business Manager, located in Huntsville, AL, leads Turner Construction for the state of Alabama.

Editorial