Co-ordination required to reduce construction’s grim suicide rate

Dr M May Seitanidi is a reader in strategy at Kent Business School, University of Kent

Males working in the construction industry are at particular risk of suicide, representing the UK’s highest occupational risk group for years now. The highest level of risk – almost four times the national norm – is among those in low-skilled roles.

Multiple factors play a role in these awful outcomes. They include working away from home, long hours, job uncertainty, tight deadlines, financial pressure, and working in a damaging male-dominated ‘macho’ culture.

These factors are made worse when supervisors tell vulnerable construction workers to ‘man up or leave’ – as related by one construction worker interviewed by BBC Radio 5 Live earlier this month. This highlights the urgent need for the construction industry to develop a collaborative response to suicide prevention that includes the entire industry and offers opportunities for all to have an active role.

Given the industry’s fragmentation, preventing suicides cannot be a company-by-company solution. A scoping report compiled following an industry-wide collaborative forum organised by the University of Kent in the summer of 2020 provided three key suggestions.

Three-point approach to preventing suicide

First, suicide prevention must be approached as a complex social issue, not simply as an issue of mental health. Whilst people must understand the subject, over-simplification of the problem can undermine the reality of people’s experiences and therefore not lead to the required holistic solutions.

If the solutions don’t embrace the complexity of people’s lives, they will continue to mirror the fragmentation of disciplines and structures we find in the healthcare system. People will continue to fall through multiple cracks in the system which, as we know, leads to the tragic reality we see reported.

“In the UK, 6,859 people lost their lives to suicide in 2018 with workers in construction professions at 1.6 times the national average risk”

It is not enough to suggest that some people have or develop mental health problems and to then examine the causes only for that individual. What is absent from the picture is a process of identifying factors present across the entire system – the construction industry itself and how the industry practices suicide prevention. Only by building up a more holistic picture can we understand which provisions work and which require strengthening.

Second, the industry can avoid fragmentation of its suicide prevention efforts by aiming for a collaborative approach involving co-ordination among the various stakeholders within the industry. However, this must be in addition to collaboration with external suicide prevention support, such as public and non-profit organisations.

Although dedicated support is offered by many organisations, the support is not appropriately coordinated across the construction industry. This makes it unlikely that the available support will match needs, systematically for the industry, despite the good intentions of all involved.

Third, a better understanding of the gap between the intent and implementation of suicide prevention measures will shed light on new aspects of the social issue. There is no simple solution to complex social issues. Collaborative action to understand and co-develop solutions is the best starting point.

In the UK, 6,859 people lost their lives to suicide in 2018 with workers in construction professions at 1.6 times the national average risk, and those in low-skilled functions at 3.7 times higher. This results in around two deaths every working day across the industry.

Collaborative action is needed now to protect the most vulnerable individuals in the sector.