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Addressing mental health in the workplace
In this week's episode of What's at Stake, host and Managing Director Ylan Mui delves into the critical issue of mental health in the workplace. With poor mental health leading to significant productivity losses and high turnover, it's an issue businesses can't afford to ignore.
This episode spotlights Bechtel's $7 million partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, aimed at addressing the high suicide rates in the construction industry. The episode features a panel Ylan moderated with insights from Bechtel Chairman and CEO Brendan Bechtel, along with key leaders from the foundation and North America's Building Trades Union, highlighting the power of public-private partnerships and stakeholder collaboration in improving mental health outcomes across industries.
Welcome to this week's episode of what's at Stake. I'm Ilan Moy, your host and a managing director at Pentit. Today, we're talking about an issue that's become critical in the workplace mental health. Studies show that poor mental health can lead to significant declines in productivity, an increase in absenteeism and higher rates of turnover. According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety alone cost the global economy an estimated trillion dollars a year in lost productivity.
Speaker 1:Addressing mental health in the workplace is now seen as essential for maintaining a healthy, motivated and productive workforce, and public-private partnerships are a powerful tool that can make a real difference. In today's episode, we'll hear firsthand how one of the world's oldest and largest construction companies is tackling this challenge head-on. Bechtel recently announced a $7 million multi-year partnership with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. The construction industry has one of the highest rates of suicide of any sector in the country, and addressing this problem requires collaboration, communication and trust across multiple stakeholder groups, including executives, labor unions, health professionals and, of course, the workers themselves. I spoke with Bechtel Chairman and CEO Brendan Bechtel for a recent panel discussion about their partnership. The discussion also included Robert Gebbia, head of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, dr Christine Moutier, the group's chief medical officer, and Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Union. This effort offers important lessons for businesses in any industry on how deep engagement with stakeholders can benefit all. It was a moving and eye-opening conversation. We hope you find it valuable as well.
Speaker 2:This is the largest grant the organization has ever received, and today we're going to talk about the problem, of course, but also the potential solutions that this funding can help support, and I know the commitment of everyone here on stage to improving mental health within the construction community. So, brendan, I'm going to start with you If you could tell us a little bit more about this effort. What is it why you're doing it now and what you hope it will achieve?
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you First. Thank you everybody for coming. This is an incredible show of support. I think we're really sort of meeting this moment. We were talking about that downstairs as we were getting ready.
Speaker 3:I think my role today on the panel is really to help with my good friend and colleague, sean McGarvey, who leads all the building trades unions in all of North America. Thank you for being here, sean, and representing your members. I think our role is to really give you some insight into the industry and what is it specifically about the industry that is contributing or exacerbating a real mental health crisis, particularly around suicide, as you said, you know I had the opportunity to actually grow up on and around Bechtel construction sites since the age of three and first working at 14, and so you know, 20 plus years actually working in the industry. And, as Sean will say in his own words, I hope in a little bit, the people that choose to make their careers in our industry are incredible people and I'm proud to call them my family, my friends, my colleagues. These are strong, resourceful, hardworking people. They're proud people. They tend, on average, to be overwhelmingly men, masculine, a bit macho.
Speaker 3:Industry's been talked about that way in the past, but the impact of mental health challenges and specifically suicide on those people is being felt at a disproportionate rate. So, as a company, so Bechtel you know, bechtel is one of the largest construction companies in the US. We work all over the world. We spend as a company, we invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year in keeping our people physically safe on our projects. But then one of our colleagues might go back to their room in the construction camp and take their own life camp and take their own life, and today we are five times as likely to lose a colleague to suicide as we are to an industrial accident on one of our sites as an industry and I think there's a lot to be learned from that, because as an industry, we have been so successful in driving down site accidents over the last 30 plus years that we've now earned the right, I think, to push on to the next frontier of physical safety, mental health, well-being and really get after this.
Speaker 3:So now, on top of that, as Sean knows, we've got a massive construction boom underway and continue to expand here in the United States with all of the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS Act and all the clean energy provisions, so it's going to be a massive demand and pressure on construction workers, intrinsically stressful, detail-oriented, high-paced sort of operating environment that we double down on pushing to this next frontier of safety and health for our industry, which is something I think we know something about. So we know a lot about our industry but we don't know that much about suicide prevention. I myself, as I was coming up in my career as a site manager, project manager, I have never in my career lost a direct colleague to an industrial accident on a site I was responsible for. I have lost colleagues to suicide on projects that I led.
Speaker 3:So we're at this moment now where I think there's a broader discussion on mental health and suicide prevention we started looking for okay, we know we want to do something in our 125th year to celebrate and give back to the people that have enabled the success of our company, and we wanted to partner with the best institution that we could find that had real subject matter expertise and experience preventing suicide, and partner on an industry-specific set of resources and tools to get after it.
Speaker 3:And getting after it is something our industry does really well. So you know we're going to contribute to this effort, this partnership, our industry experience. We're going to bring lessons learned in that we've learned from working in places like Australia and the UK, which are, frankly, years ahead of the United States in the way that they think about suicide prevention and mental health as a public health crisis, and the goal with this $7 million grant program and partnership is that over the next five years, we want to touch and improve at least 500,000, half a million construction workers' lives. That's the goal and we can do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you brought up a number of really great points that we're going to dig deeper into throughout this discussion. Bob, I want to turn to you because Brendan talked about sort of the culture of the construction industry and the unique challenges that construction workers face. You all have worked with a number of different industries. You have your national network. You all have worked with a number of different industries. You have your national network. What are ways that you expect to be able to tailor this initiative to the unique challenges of the construction community?
Speaker 4:Yeah, great question. Let me start, though, in thanking really Bechtel Company for the leadership on this industry-wide, and that's been clear from day one. This is an industry-wide initiative, but leaders matter and we thank you for that. And obviously the resources that we're getting will allow us to really ramp up to hire dedicated staff to work with this initiative. So that's great, because that gives us the wherewithal. But back to your question you know it is groundbreaking in so many ways. One way is that it is an industry-wide initiative. We've worked piecemeal in different groups, we work a little bit with law enforcement and other groups, but nothing ever like this that's so industry-wide and sustainable over a long period. And one thing we have learned about suicide prevention it's not one and done. It's got to be sustainable. It's got to actually change the culture which you're working within if you want to see it kind of take on and become its own over time. So this is a five-year initiative that will allow for that building of a sustainable model. So we're excited about that.
Speaker 4:I think the other thing that's groundbreaking is the timing. You know this wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago, certainly not 20 years ago. Have been possible 10 years ago, certainly not 20 years ago, the stigma around mental health and certainly the misconceptions, the myths around suicide it wouldn't have been something that could be done. The barriers would be too big. But the timing is perfect in our view, because attitudes are changing. We just conducted, about a year ago, with our colleagues at the Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, a Harris Poll of adults in the US. Nine out of ten US adults now believe suicide is a preventable cause of death. That's a sea change from where it was 10 years ago. So that tells me the timing is right, that those working in this industry you know there's still barriers, let's be honest, it's not easy, but I think it's changing and also they understand the importance of their mental health. It's as important as their physical health. That's another change.
Speaker 4:But there's another finding we had too, and that is that people want to help but they're not sure how. And what does that say? Well, it's education and training. And this model is built on doing a lot of educational work, a lot of training, to really build the kind of knowledge base you need for a suicide prevention program. And I've got to tell you it fits so well with our initiatives to try to work with high-risk populations If we want to change the trajectory of suicide in our country, we have to look at the high-risk groups. That's veterans, which has got similarities here. It's also black and brown youth, which is showing alarming trends going up. It's people in rural communities and it's occupations and this is one of the highest occupations, as we've heard. So we're excited about this. We think it's a model for replication with other groups and I think we're on to something and obviously we'll measure it as we go, but it's really an exciting initiative which we're just so, so grateful to be a part of.
Speaker 2:Sean, I'd like to bring you in because your union represents, I think, 3 million workers. Is this at the top of their priority list? How are they feeling?
Speaker 5:and thinking about this issue. I think that our experience with this issue, particularly coming through COVID, we've gone through about, you know, 15 years or so of dealing with the opioid crisis which really opened the door, unfortunately, in the construction industry to suicide numbers jumping pretty dramatically. And then I think we got through COVID and I think everybody recognized, as we went through that together, individually, in our family settings, that everybody struggled. So I think a level of acceptance that everybody's dealing with it in some way somehow in their family, if not individually. So for us, for our members, you know education is the key, as Brendan knows. You know our culture was set, quite honestly, when the greatest generation come back from World War II, you know you're talking about a group of men that seen it all, done it all, killed it all, watched it all be killed when they were 18 or 19 years old. I'm going to talk about setting a macho culture when they, you know they were just going to build the middle class. Now that was kind of a minor objective compared to what they, what they have been through, that's carried on for decades in our industry. And to admit that you know you're struggling or that you, you know you just don't feel right, you know is hard, had been hard to do.
Speaker 5:And the other complicating factor for the construction industry is we, our members. The way our collective bargaining works is there's no paid holidays, there's no paid sick days. You know your mother dies. You don't get paid when you go to barrier right. You don't get paid for Christmas. You're not paid for your birthday. You get paid for the hours that you work. So you're incentivized okay, whether you're dinged up or banged up to keep going and keep on the job. So that can lead down various different paths, bad paths, whether it's alcohol abuse or drug abuse, whatever's going to keep you getting out of that truck every morning and being productive. The other thing about our industry is whether it's fair or unfair. You're based on your skill sets and your productivity.
Speaker 5:And if I was on a job site working for any contractor USA and there was a young 30-year-old and me, a 60-year-old, and the amount of work that was left was becoming de minimis, chances are the 60-year-old person would be furloughed before the 30-year-old, thinking that the production level of the 30-year-old is better than the 60-year-old, which most times Argyle doesn't always make up for it. So you got all these factors that lead to where I think our members are at now, and it's not quite an acceptance, but it's an awakening and understanding of. You know what? This isn't unique to me, this isn't unique to my family. You know what? This isn't unique to me, this isn't unique to my family, this isn't unique to my colleagues.
Speaker 5:So I'm interested in at least having the conversation where before these were conversations. I would say that didn't happen on our job sites, didn't happen in, you know, when people were eating lunch or having coffee. But it's starting. So it's a start. I think the timing of what Brendan and his company are doing, along with many of our other colleagues from the EPC community that are in the room, my brother union and sister union members that are here, and some of the things that we at NAB2 are going to roll out to create this as Brendan coined a phrase, a psychologically safe job site, not just a physically safe job site in April at our legislative conference, I think the timing is really good. So I think our people are ready.
Speaker 2:Christine, one sort of theme that has come up so far is this idea of stigma on the job side and stigma around this issue. What does some of the latest research tell us about how to push through that barrier and how to address the problem?
Speaker 6:Yeah, it's a great question. So well, what I've been thinking about this partnership is so incredible because the timing, as I'm hearing in the construction industry, is meeting the timing of the suicide research field really maturing, and so if this were even, I would say, 15 years ago, we would not have the answers that we have today in terms of what drives suicide risk and what amounts to effective suicide prevention strategies. We just didn't. The research field is an exciting place right now. Afsp is the leading private funder of all suicide research globally globally, and we are sitting in this incredible, wonderful spot of of being honored and privileged to translate that science and those answers into actionable strategies.
Speaker 6:So stigma reduction is always kind of a baseline, first step when it comes to preventing suicide. Um, you know the, the kind of knowledge that we're hearing already here today that all human beings have physical and mental health. That is just ubiquitous. We can all take a deep breath and realize that that is normal, that is okay. But it also gives us a responsibility that there are things we can do to optimize both safety on the job but also our personal physical health and our personal mental health physical health and our personal mental health From an occupational or workplace standpoint.
Speaker 6:There are policies that can make those barriers to help seeking diminish. There are strategies that have to do with storytelling that can change culture, and that's where a top-down priority on suicide prevention can meet bottom-up, real-life people who are struggling but who are looked up to amongst their peers and when they talk about the trials and tribulations they've been through and what they've done to address their own mental health needs or their family members, that really normalizes those behaviors amongst a workplace setting. So I really do feel that the timing is right. We are going to learn together about how to customize what, you know, what hits it on the head and what might kind of fall flat. We will be measuring that impact as we go along and we really do want this to be all inclusive and you know we believe at AFSP everyone has a role to play in suicide prevention and I think that's the spirit that's certainly coming into this partnership as well for the construction industry.
Speaker 2:Brendan, I want to dig a little bit into the phrase that you coined psychologically safe job and understand a little bit more. What are the lessons learned from the idea of physical safety that we can bring to mental health when it comes to your workers and your employees, and I'd like to open that up to everyone as well. But, brendan, let's start with you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, ilan, as I mentioned this a bit in my first set of comments, but I think as an industry first set of comments. But I think you know, as an industry, and I just want to pause for a minute and thank those of you from other companies in the industry that are here, and we appreciate that many of you are going to be on the working group and I'm going to come after each of your CEOs and try to get them signed up for the CEO advisory board. But this is, you know, everybody has said it, but the goal here is to build the biggest tent that we possibly can for the CEO advisory board. But this is, you know, everybody has said it, but the goal here is to build the biggest tent that we possibly can for the whole industry and all the people in it. That's the goal, and I think one of the lessons from what we as an industry working with labor have done over the last 35 years is that you know it's a terrible thing, but 35 years ago as a company, you used to set a target for how many people were going to die on your project every year. And you say we're only going to kill four people this year with industrial accidents. Well, 30 years ago we and some of our peers decided the only acceptable number of people to lose or hurt on a construction site is zero, and it took us 30 years to get there. But we're there, which is why today we're losing five times as many people to suicide as we are to industrial accidents. So there's a playbook that our industry knows how to execute really, really well, because we've done it with physical safety and I spoke before. A company like ours spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on safety, equipment, safety training, safety personnel, people in the field, leadership out in the field. There's no reason we couldn't do the same for mental health, particularly if it's killing five times as many people as physical safety is on our jobs.
Speaker 3:Everyone in our industry has the mindset Sean talked about it before where your responsibility to take care of your colleagues or your brothers and sisters it doesn't end when you walk out the gate of the site.
Speaker 3:We hope that people take that home with them, which is, of course, where a lot of people are choosing to end their lives. So I think that the you know we have proven to ourselves and those in our industry that getting to zero is possible. That's our ambition here too and you know we've made incredible progress on physical safety and our attention. You know, to us it's sort of a very logical next step. It's clearly the next frontier from a safety and well-being perspective to go after mental health more broadly but to start with the most extreme consequences of that, suicide prevention. Then we hope and expect as a company and as an industry that as we start with a focus on preventing suicide in our industry, that will force us all to move further upstream into other aspects of mental health which of course you know are well understood as contributing factors for risk of suicide.
Speaker 4:And I would add just this idea of psychological safety is really key here, because there was a program that the Air Force instituted 20 years ago and we learned a lot from that.
Speaker 4:We did learn about sustainability too, because once they withdrew the leadership from it and got off the radar, the suicides went up again. They were going down. But one of the other things is to drive this message it's okay to ask for help, you're not going to lose your job, you're not going to be, you know, stigmatized, you know, and you have to change culture to get to there. So leadership matters, because that message does need to come, whether it's in the trade union leadership or the companies, but also at the project manager level. And I think, to make sure that people feel safe asking for help, that it won't jeopardize their future careers and employment, because that's a barrier. We see that in schools, we see that in the medical field, we see that across the board. So I think creating this idea that it's okay is a big part of driving this. If we're going to be successful, I think that's really important to change the culture.
Speaker 3:So, sean, imagine I think this will resonate with you, but you know for most of you when was the last time you walked past a serious construction site and didn't see someone with a hard hat on? Pretty much everyone in the world wears a hard hat now on a construction site. Let's imagine a future hopefully no more than five years from now where people think about mental health and supporting people that are contemplating suicide. It's as natural an act for the people in our industry as putting on your hard hat. You don't go to putting on your hard hat. You don't go to work without your hard hat. Why would you go to work without thinking about a mental health toolkit that's customized for Sean's members in our industry? Right, that's the vision.
Speaker 5:So sorry, yeah, and I think that that is certainly you know, in the program we're working on, where there's natural leaders on job sites, just the way we're structured foreman, general foreman, superintendents, shop stewards they need to be the leaders and the spokesmen, not just for laying out the safety concerns for the day, the physical safety concerns, the work packages, the execution, the teams, but also to be leaders in talking about the unknown and unseen issues that are, you know, perpetual on a construction site. And and I agree with, with Brendan, that you know, if you have the right people leading and you have the right people that will open themselves up to the youngest member, the oldest person on the job site that's struggling with something, give them some training to recognize signs and then, you know, have that safe space. As, as was said, that you know there's no reflection here, there's no. You know our people, you know, at base, are like libertarians or entrepreneurs, right, they have a set of skill sets with their hands, their tools in their head and they can take it anywhere they want to, but having the security of having a steady, full time job is really important to them. So, exposing themselves to, to anybody, letting that shield down that you know they might be a liability in some form or some fashion is is. Is really terrifies them and our culture is pretty unique, a little bit like the military we do a lot of work with, with transitioning so they feel comfortable in our trades.
Speaker 5:But, like Brendan said, it's not. You know, we want them to be on the safest job site in the world. We want them the two safest places for them to be is to be on that job site all day when they get there, both from a physical and mental health perspective and at their house. But somewhere in that transition from job site to alone time or to family issues or to whatever, is where the triggering starts to happen and our communication breaks down between the camaraderie on the job site, everybody looking out for each other, when everybody goes home to deal with their own business, trying to build some bridges there so that people know you know somebody's always going to be at the other end of the phone. Just pick it up. And I'm pretty proud of, you know, my international unions. They all have these coins now right that they hand out. You know people keep in their pocket Like a challenge coin.
Speaker 5:Yeah, here's a number to call. So we're making progress. But bridging from the job site into the personal time is the void that we see right now, because we just had one at Tennessee Valley Authority. Father was the superintendent, kid was an insulator, probably within the last month, you know, worked all day, went home, never came back, so no explanation.
Speaker 2:Sean, does the progress and the sort of shift in culture around physical safety that's been made over the past 30 years give you hope that this can transform the industry in terms of mental health as well?
Speaker 5:I have no doubt. I have no doubt because leaders are leading. I will be honest with you For us it's been frustrating, particularly on the opioid side. I think it's pretty well established by the courts of the United States what exacerbated that problem in this country. And we have a health and safety arm called the Center to Protect Workers' Rights and it's a construction research health and safety arm called the Center to Protect Workers' Rights and it's a construction research, health and safety operation and lots of really smart people do that work that help drive down the zero death goals that we've set.
Speaker 5:We put together a $10 million proposal for an opioid, serious opioid program and took it to pharma. And you know, I know this is criticism that'll spread, but I got to be honest with you. They were spending I don't know 30, 40 million dollars a month lobbying against different pieces of legislation in this town and when we went and we asked, with hat in hand, to help us, help our members and their families with this opioid crisis, we were supposed to be thankful that they gave us $300,000. Now I got to be honest with you. You know, on a different day my response would have been different, but my team looked at me and said, hey, if it's just $300,000. So we got five studies in the field right now, with academics spending that $300,000. But this now this gives me real hope that we're on to something. We're all coming together best practices across international unions, best practices across contracting community, best practices together with the mental health community. I know we're not going to prevent every suicide, but we're going to drive that number down because that is really the goal.
Speaker 3:Just to pile on. I think for those who aren't as familiar with our industry, it's intrinsic in what Sean has just been saying, and I know all of our peer companies that are here today feel this way too. There's no competition when it comes to safety or well-being. There's no proprietary, bechtel-specific way to promote mental health, which is why and that's been part of the secret of success I think it didn't matter if you were management or labor. We all wanted to improve physical safety for everybody in our industry. That's the same mindset that we're launching this partnership and trying to build the biggest tent that we can, because everybody wins if we get even a little bit better at this right, and so I just want to again say thank you to the broad representation from the industry here that there are no competitors within the industry when it comes to this. We're all teammates, so I just yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah and Christine, there are things that certainly individual companies within the industry can learn from each other. There are also best practices that the construction industry can learn from other industries and other sectors, such as the military. What are you seeing in terms of the best ways and the best lessons from the way this issue has been addressed within the veterans community that we can maybe apply to the construction industry?
Speaker 6:Sure. So there are several examples of effective suicide prevention strategies that have been carried out in a particular population. The United States Air Force is one of those. And I will just say, speaking from personal experience, the reason I'm solely focused on suicide prevention in my life and career relates to experiences I had within the health system world and the loss of physician and resident medical student colleagues that I was experiencing where I used to work, at UCSD, where there was a very high rate occurring and probably not just there but in many healthcare settings, and what we did at the time the hospital CEO and the big D dean of the medical school I was a younger small D dean they really charged myself and a colleague of mine to get to the bottom of this, meaning how many people are dying? What are the environmental factors that might increase physicians' risk for suicide?
Speaker 6:And we did a far and wide search to figure out. What can you do? It was a legitimate question back around 2000. Can an environment, can a workplace, can a culture have a bearing on suicide risk for individuals? Because it used to be thought that it was so sort of individual and random. It was not well understood as the complicated but health outcome that it is. And at UCSD what we found was the US Air Force model. Now, what they did was a very military-style 13-point strategy, but the heart and soul of that program was educating every level of the community, opening up barriers to care, destigmatizing help-seeking so that it was top-down, but also peer-to-peer, where, for example, your culture around help out your buddy is going to be just easily translated into those mental health caring conversations that we can teach people to have.
Speaker 6:I think a really clear target for addressing is similar to physicians and military and other law enforcement, which is an overemphasis on self-sufficiency. And you know, look, we have that in across people groups all over the world and certainly in American culture. But in certain occupations that's even more kind of piled on because there had been reasons that individuals thought they could lose their, let's say, medical license or, in this case, time on the job or respect of their peers if they seek help for mental health, and not that long ago those were true kind of punitive consequences people would experience. So I do think again that just tailoring this public health approach to reducing suicide, which has been effective in other populations, and really tailoring it to this, setting this culture, hopefully changing some aspects of culture around mental health and help seeking making it okay for these conversations to occur. Just one more point that I'll make that you can have an environment and a larger populations culture changing beautifully.
Speaker 6:What is the challenge always remains that, as an individual, if you are the one who's going through something, that kind of tunnel vision that occurs at a moment of suffering, desperation, hopelessness, feeling like you're a burden to others, that intensity of that acute suicide risk, first of all it's short term. It only lasts a short period of time If there are no lethal means around them. So decreasing access to lethal means is one of the key strategies. But that human experience, that kind of piles on some self-stigma and shame, can be broken through by a buddy, by an intervention that can occur. So thinking about those between the workplace and then home environment. So you know it might also engage training and educating family members and other aspects of the surrounding support network. Anyway, I'm very excited because I think there's a number of ways to already start thinking about tailoring the strategy.
Speaker 2:Brendan Bechtel is a global company and you are working Australia, saudi Arabia, across the world. What have you seen in other countries that they've been able to do in order to bring down their rate of suicide? What are some lessons learned from other countries in terms of suicide prevention?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think there's some great models in Australia, and the UK in particular, where we have firsthand experience operating there. So in the early 2010s I was the project manager for one of our really big energy projects in Australia. We had 4,000 of our construction craft professional colleagues living in a construction camp on an island and the culture there around mental health as an important part of public health and the support that's available, helped by the fact that a country of 20-something million people, it's a little easier to wrap your head around the supply of mental health professionals to meet the demand. But as an industry, the industry because such a high proportion of Australians, as compared to here, actually work in the sort of resources and construction sector and because so many of them live away from home in camps at remote locations. When I say camp, I don't mean like a tent, I mean like these are really nice places, but you work long hours, you're away from the family or people or things that you love that keep you anchored and centered. You're gone for long periods of time and it can exacerbate feelings of loneliness, even though you're part of a team.
Speaker 3:And I would just say that there were industry specific protocols and guidance and toolkits that were increasingly available to us as we went through these projects.
Speaker 3:That really changed the way I thought about this and, by the way, I know we have some Australians in the crowd and I say this with so much love, but, like, australia is a pretty macho culture and what was so clever was, I think, that the organizations that figured out how to tailor suicide prevention and mental health promotion toolkits for our industry, toolkits for our industry. They figure out how to weaponize that macho a little bit and how to use professional rugby players to come in and give a talk about their own mental health challenges and how they got help, and so they sort of took advantage of that vector of masculinity to make it cool and masculine to actually give and offer help and really destigmatize it. Now there are organizations like in the UK there's one called Mates in Mind, which is an industry-specific mental health suicide prevention organization. So what we're trying to do with this partnership is basically create the equivalent here in the United States so that we can share best practices.
Speaker 2:Bob and Christine, I wanted to ask you you spoke so powerfully about the challenges that someone who is facing that sort of acute crisis is going through. If you think that someone is going through that hard time, what do we do as an individual? What's the best way to reach out to someone who you think might be facing that trauma?
Speaker 4:Just one thing comes to mind right away it's okay to ask them. You know the myth about if I ask them I'm going to put the thought in their head it's going to make it worse is not the case. Research shows it's okay to ask Are you feeling okay? Are you struggling, are you thinking of hurting yourself? And the honesty actually can open up the conversation and it's not a problem to ask. I think that's been a myth and it's clearly not something we should worry about.
Speaker 4:We need to teach people how to ask. You want to show empathy. You don't want to talk down and say, just pull yourself together. That's not the message you want to convey, but it's okay to ask. I'm going to say just pull yourself together. That's not the message you want to convey, but it's okay to ask. I think that's one thing we've learned. I also just going back to this question about other industries for a second. I think this is going to raise the bar for other industries because we haven't had such a major industry focus. We've done pieces, whether it's in the medical field or with police and so on, but we can learn things here that will raise the bar for other industries and make them more willing to do something on a scale like this. So I'm excited about that aspect and five years from now, if we're asked that question, we might point to this program, this initiative, as the way to do this, the way we're talking about the Air Force. So it's just. I think we're going to learn so much from this.
Speaker 6:But, christine, I'll no, I mean, as you're saying, bob, it's something that we do a lot of at AFSP is just educating all sorts of different folks in the public about trusting your gut If you notice that somebody doesn't see seem themselves, and you don't have to be a mental health professional to notice that behavior has shifted, even in a subtle way. Now we've all been socialized in ways that work against us, and so that's part of where a laser-focused educational campaign can help people to realize. That's the moment you're in, where you're realizing they don't seem themselves and instead of doing what we usually do, which is to sort of rationalize and say, ah well, they just had that breakup, they just got that bad grade, so I'm going to just kind of do nothing. It's a very odd response we have, but I think it's a rationalization based on all sorts of things. We don't want to offend them, but at the end of the day, like Bob said, in our Harris poll we found people don't actually know how to have a conversation in a way that is effective, caring, compassionate, but really does allow that person to open up and take the next step. You know, a certain percentage in any population in any 30-day window of time are having thoughts of suicide. So it's a very human experience. You, being a caring person that happens to intersect and notice that and allow them to talk about the stressors they're experiencing maybe.
Speaker 6:Well, what I was going to say too is suicidal thoughts. People oftentimes tell nobody. There's research that shows that about half of young people who are having thoughts of suicide ever tell nobody. There's research that shows that, you know, about half of young people who are having thoughts of suicide ever tell anyone. And the majority, when they do tell someone, it's a peer. So again, the peer-to-peer conversation amongst adults can be very powerful. So you know, there is a way. It'll be part of our educational toolkit. I'm sure I love having this conversation because it's so different than people get very afraid of it.
Speaker 6:But I think once you lower everyone's anxiety and realize that if you notice that, whatever your neighbor or if you knew they were going through something let's say their spouse had cancer or they were in an accident you would come towards that. You would come and offer help. You would come towards that. You would come and offer help. You would ask them how they're doing. You would practice active listening skills to pick up on the cues of what they need and offer help. In those regards. It's very much aligned with those normal conversations around mental health and suicidal thoughts. We are just not very practiced as a society at doing that, so in a way it is creating this. In my mind it's sort of like utopia. It's a culture where there really is no stigma, where you understand that suffering happens to all of us at different points for different reasons, and that being a caring individual is positive both for the person who is suffering and also, by the way, for us as the caregivers. It helps elevate our own kind of sense of purpose and meaning.
Speaker 3:Elon can I just share. So one of the reasons why we're so excited about this partnership with experts that have looked at many different sectors and industries and occupations, but also to engage everybody else from our industry is I know each of the other companies and each of the different unions have everybody's doing something on this already. So we decided several years ago we need to do everything we can internally without any outside help, before we start to ask others in the industry to come together. And so for several years now, every single project before it goes to the field has a project-specific mental health plan, which, just like we've always had a project-specific environmental safety and health plan, we will not let a project go to the field without a plan that includes resources and what's going to happen, under what kind of circumstances and who do you call and what's the first response.
Speaker 3:The thing that I think is so awesome today that tells us that we're over the target is, on a voluntary basis, we've been offering mental health first responder training to people on our projects. We were just the leadership team was just in Australia. We went to a project where we've got maybe 150 staff on the project and like 15 or 16 of them have completed this mental health first responder training. It's just like going through first aid training it teaches you how to have these conversations. It helps you feel comfortable saying, bob, are you okay? You know it seems like something's going on and you get the coaching on how to do that.
Speaker 3:Now we want to know what the next thing is that we can be doing to help right, and that's why we want to get together and share best practices and we want to collect data and metrics. And are we for the emphasis on the right syllable? With this right, I mean we can. So I think that's where I'm really keen to get this working group launched and to learn what others are doing that we haven't thought of and to feed that in. And we need the research, the industry-specific research, to really figure out how we can get after this.
Speaker 2:Bob, I wanted to ask you we talked a little bit about what's happening in other countries, but of course we are here in Washington Are there any specific policies that you would encourage our lawmakers, our policymakers, to look at and consider?
Speaker 4:Yes, absolutely. I mean we have a whole policy arm. I mean Christine mentioned the research and the education. And the third piece of what we do is to advocate, and we have people who have lived experience, as well as researchers and clinicians, speaking out about what needs to happen from a policy point of view, legislative point of view. I think the two things that come to mind quickly on that is and you all know about 988, right Show of hands. Everyone know about 988? Great. Well, you know it's not done. It's not done. And talk about demand. Once it became available, demand spiked.
Speaker 4:We need to keep building out how we respond to people in crisis. What does that look like? A place to call? We now have that. It's going to need more help, more resources. So, from a policy point of view, advocating for that. But also, when someone responds, what's their training? Whether it's law enforcement or it's mental health, they need training on how to cope with that situation. And where do you take people? We know emergency rooms aren't the place to take them, because you could be sitting there for days, you could be boarded. There's no place to put them. And those are real issues. There's these ideas of respite centers and places where you immediately get mental health care. So there's a lot more advocacy to do in how we respond to people in crisis because we say go get help, right.
Speaker 4:The second piece is about that. We have to make mental health care more accessible and affordable. If we don't do that, we're pushing people. You know, go get help, it's okay to get help, but if you can't find help, you can't afford help. So we got workforce issues and other things there. So those are really big policy pushes mental health parity, so that mental health coverage is equal to physical health coverage. It's been the law of the land for over 10 years. It's not fully implemented. There's not compliance. We're working on that. So I think there's pieces in the policy space that could make it easier and that has direct impact on the construction industry. Right, someone's in crisis, someone needs help. How do you connect them to care and it's affordable and accessible.
Speaker 3:This is a really important point and Sean was hinting at this before. But it was not that long ago that employers used to think about our construction craft professionals from the shoulders down and you were here to apply manual labor to a problem, and what great companies in our industry figured out pretty quickly was that we were leaving a lot of capability and productivity on the table and that we really needed to engage our construction craft professionals from the shoulders up and make sure that their head is in the game from a safety and productivity perspective, and the gains that we saw from that as a company were extraordinary. At the end of the day, that and this whole discussion here fundamentally for us as a company, it's about restoring the dignity and purpose of the person on the tools in our industry, and one of the reasons people in our industry choose to take their life is they don't feel like they're getting that dignity and respect that they deserve, and so you know, we have for 10 years we've been leveraging neuroscience to teach people, as in people on the tools on our job sites, mindfulness techniques, techniques so they can get out of the fight or flight part of their brain and get into the higher thinking order, higher order thinking part of their brain as they're about to go do a complex, high-risk task. So to what you were just saying, bob, and sean, to what you were saying, I think that you know all these things are coming together like could, could you?
Speaker 3:Some of you are sitting there going what a construction company is teaching mindfulness techniques on its job site. Yeah, we are, because it really works and it's saving people's lives from a physical safety perspective. So I think what we will come up with together to build on that to as we were talking about downstairs, bob, I thought it was a really important point you made. Yes, this partnership, this effort, this industry-wide effort, it is about saving lives. It's also about improving lives. Sean, you've always said forever, you're in the improving lives business for your members, and we feel the same way, and in some cases we'll have to save that life before we get a chance to improve it, but that's a big part of it too.
Speaker 2:Sean, do you want to weigh in?
Speaker 5:Yeah, I think that you know it's a new day, you know, in the construction industry and when Brendan says that, you know it's shared across competitors. This isn't a competitive issue. It's shared across unions. It's shared across, you know, the age differentials between the newest recruits and the oldest folks. And it's also the other piece that I think will be really, really valuable when we get some of the data back and we get some of the training ingrained, is it's going to help? You know it's going to help in families, right, it's going to help in the household when it's not necessarily the construction craft professional that has the issues, but there's issues in the house and they're going to be armed with more resources and knowledge and expertise of how and where to position somebody, how to engage the conversation and then where next steps are to go get the professional help that that somebody needs.
Speaker 5:Where you know there are a lot of unknowns right now and I know that you know listen to Bob the the, particularly coming out of covid you know the amount of availability on mental health professionals for people to to be able to schedule an appointment. That's a crisis in itself in the United States right now when somebody tries to get an appointment with a professional and they say, ok, how's July 12th? Well, we're in crisis right now, so I can commit to the to the building trades legislative and regulatory operations getting shoulder to the wheel up on Capitol Hill or wherever else. We need to get new legislation passed or to get finalized legislation that's been passed in the past, so that we fully deploy the resources that we need, not just for the construction industry but for the country that's great, that's a big shoulder on a big wheel.
Speaker 3:I can tell you from personal experience. That's a big shoulder on a big wheel. I can tell you from personal experience that's a big offer. Thank you, sean.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, with our final moments here, I'd like to ask each of you to just look forward a little bit. If we're back here five years from now at the initiative fully underway, what do you hope to be able to say that you've accomplished? We can just go down the line.
Speaker 5:What do you hope to be able to say that you've accomplished? We can just go down the line. You know just that.
Speaker 6:You know that we at NAB2 were part of a team that made life a little bit better for people in the construction industry and their families, steve Well, effective suicide prevention to me looks like starting out by again applying evidence and customizing it to a population and measuring as you go. So while we want to ultimately measure reductions in suicide rates, which right now amongst construction professionals is almost double for men compared to male American workers and about 25% higher for women who work in construction compared to women who work in other industries in this country, that will be the holy grail is bringing down those rates. But there are interim outcome measures that I hope we will have toolkits, we will have applied them and we will have measured some of those interim intermediary results and be able to share that.
Speaker 3:I'm leaving here with a lot of hope and optimism about where we'll be in five years. It's a special kind of person that chooses to make this industry their career. It's really hard work. It's very stressful, it's very demanding. The next five or six years are going to be even more demanding and stressful than the prior five or six when we just think about the amount of work that's out there to do. But again, this industry has proven that it excels at doing hard things that no one else can do, most notably what we've done around physical safety on our projects and I again, that's kind of a playbook and a set of strategies and tactics that our whole industry knows how to do well, which is why I'm pretty excited. Once we get the right expertise and once we get pointed in the right direction on what we can do, I think as an industry we can stop being the second highest risk industry for risk of suicide that's out there. That is a shameful statistic for us as an industry and we will not rest until we change it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you know, at the end of the day, we want to have measurable outcomes. We would love to see you know, both from a data point of view life saved but also the stories you know. We need to capture that because at the end of the day, that's going to carry forward. You know, if people we know there's stories where people got help and their lives changed, their lives were saved, their lives were improved, and I think you know to have those measurable outcomes and those stories at the end of the five years will take us a long way into the future and again it is about saving lives.
Speaker 2:Great. Well, we know this conversation will continue for months and years to come. Thank you all for being here for this discussion. We know that the work that you do is not easy, but it is absolutely essential. So thank you, thank you.