How We Can Start the Conversation that Curbs Addiction and Saves a Life

By CAL BEYER

The topic of mental health and suicide – and its intersection with substance use – is something that I’ve known for many years.

It started in my family, and then it moved into workplaces. I worked in an emergency room, an ICU and other healthcare facilities when I was in high school and college. I had the opportunity to see life in action. I got to see the very best of life, and I got to see the sad parts of life.

I had this sense that – in the workplace – people really weren’t talking about substance use. I saw it in families, workplaces and in communities. There’s still a big stigma associated with substance use.

As I helped catalyze the construction industry’s mental health and suicide prevention initiative more than a decade ago, I was working for a contractor in Washington state. I felt there was this need to tackle substance use as a root cause. When I talked to people about heavy and binge drinking, you could see that what people was being described as excessive drinking was fairly normal in certain industry groupings.

We recognized that we needed to educate people; rather than to further stigmatize this, we needed to give people a pathway toward finding help.

The same is true today. We have an underlying substance use issue. It intersects with co-occurring mental health conditions. It also overlaps with suicide and overdose. Sadly, we talk too much about the problem and not enough about the solution.

Recovery strategies in workplaces is a pathway toward helping people. And that’s why we need to shift sole focus off construction industry suicides to this intersection, so we can offer multiple pathways to recovery to meet people where they are. Ultimately, helping people navigate addiction and achieve recovery can help reduce risk of overdose and suicide.

We need a holistic solution. And recovery is going to be the pathway by which we do it. We need to really focus on holistic well-being. I’ve always been an advocate for wellness and well-being. That intersection between physical health and emotional health is where we can really reach people.

In fact, because of the stigma associated with mental health, substance use, suicide and overdose, if we talk about worker well-being, we can move this discussion further upstream. I want construction workers in the field to know that we are becoming more enlightened. We are addressing topics like psychological safety to empower people with the ability to speak up – and to be heard and to be seen in this large, diverse industry.

Ten years ago, we were at a starting point. But today, there are at least eight groups working on suicide prevention nationally, and that doesn’t include countless associations that are leading the charge as well.

I’m hopeful that the stressors that construction workers have been feeling are being recognized and that actions are being taken. It does take time to move the ship. And I want people to recognize that when people are hurting, let’s be a friend; let’s be that person to reach out and to be an advocate.

What we need to do now is to change the way we talk about mental health in the workplace. We need to move this approach from mental illness to mental health to mental fitness and then focus more on resilience by focusing on mindfulness techniques and  teaching people coping skills and strategies. So, if they become angry or frustrated, or if they’re feeling isolated and alone, they will have more of that mental fitness with which to tackle those challenges. It’s going to be easier to do it as a team or a crew than by yourself. We need to drive this idea of peer support.

Recently I was working with a group of foremen at a union training center where some of the supervisors were concerned that this mental fitness conversation would be awkward. And I said, “Not if your company embraces this as a cultural initiative or imperative.”

If you’re the first one having such a conversation, it will be awkward but still really important to initiate. There are conversation starters from a really helpful public safety campaign called Seize the Awkward, https://seizetheawkward.org/.

It teaches you how to be bold and ask that first question. It teaches transitional statements on how to initiate a conversation, how to keep a conversation going and how to personalize it.

Field leaders know their people better than anyone. You’re a crew, you’re a team, you’re all peers and you look out for one another. And if you don’t do it, then who is going to? What we need to do is drive mental health fitness at the corporate level to put the framework in place, but the linchpins – the drivers – are truly your foremen and superintendents. And then when peer leaders decide to champion it, you have another checkpoint and it becomes really powerful when it’s peer-to-peer support.

When you arrive at this point in the process, you’re taking away the stigma, you’re taking away the blame and you’re providing a tangible and reproducible safety leadership example.

Cal Beyer, CWP, NAC, is senior director of the national nonprofit organization, SAFE (Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic) Project, www.safeproject.us. Reach out to him at [email protected] or (651) 307-7883.