The national GC Suffolk is urging the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to incorporate suicide awareness and prevention training as a “core requirement” in its OSHA 10 and OSHA 30 curricula.
In a letter dated May 2 and sent to Douglas L. Parker, Assistant Secretary of Labor overseeing OSHA, John Fish, Suffolk’s Chairman and CEO, notes that more construction workers die annually from suicide than from all other workplace-related fatalities combined. The myriad causes that lead to suicides among construction workers include high psychological stress levels, chronic pain from the physical demands of work, emotional exhaustion, and substance and alcohol abuse.
On top of that, more than 15 percent of military veterans enter the construction industry after completing their service, and vets have a 50 percent higher rate of suicide than the general population’s.
“The time is now to rally our entire industry to address this dire issue,” states the letter. During Safety Week earlier this month, Suffolk hosted Mental Health Fireside Chats with noted clinicians to educate its employees on the problem and possible solutions. The firm also hosted webinars that inform employees about Suffolk’s mental health resources.
OSHA can guide the mental health discussion
The letter to Parker was co-signed by Brig. General (retired) Jack Hammond, Executive Director of Home Base, a national nonprofit that’s the largest private-sector clinic in the U.S., having treated more than 30,000 vets and trained more than 85,000 clinicians.
Fish and Hammond believe that OSHA has a critical role to play in driving the discussion around prioritizing “a widespread culture of support and transparency regarding mental health,” through better training, awareness, and resources.
Here is a copy of the letter:
Related Stories
| Oct 13, 2010
Community college plans new campus building
Construction is moving along on Hudson County Community College’s North Hudson Campus Center in Union City, N.J. The seven-story, 92,000-sf building will be the first higher education facility in the city.
| Oct 13, 2010
Bookworms in Silver Spring getting new library
The residents of Silver Spring, Md., will soon have a new 112,000-sf library. The project is aiming for LEED Silver certification.
| Oct 13, 2010
County building aims for the sun, shade
The 187,032-sf East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, Calif., will be oriented to take advantage of daylighting, with exterior sunshades preventing unwanted heat gain and glare. The building is targeting LEED Silver. Strong horizontal massing helps both buildings better match their low-rise and residential neighbors.
| Oct 12, 2010
Holton Career and Resource Center, Durham, N.C.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. Early in the current decade, violence within the community of Northeast Central Durham, N.C., escalated to the point where school safety officers at Holton Junior High School feared for their own safety. The school eventually closed and the property sat vacant for five years.
| Oct 12, 2010
Guardian Building, Detroit, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Special Recognition. The relocation and consolidation of hundreds of employees from seven departments of Wayne County, Mich., into the historic Guardian Building in downtown Detroit is a refreshing tale of smart government planning and clever financial management that will benefit taxpayers in the economically distressed region for years to come.
| Oct 12, 2010
Richmond CenterStage, Richmond, Va.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Bronze Award. The Richmond CenterStage opened in 1928 in the Virginia capital as a grand movie palace named Loew’s Theatre. It was reinvented in 1983 as a performing arts center known as Carpenter Theatre and hobbled along until 2004, when the crumbling venue was mercifully shuttered.
| Oct 12, 2010
University of Toledo, Memorial Field House
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Memorial Field House, once the lovely Collegiate Gothic (ca. 1933) centerpiece (along with neighboring University Hall) of the University of Toledo campus, took its share of abuse after a new athletic arena made it redundant, in 1976. The ultimate insult occurred when the ROTC used it as a paintball venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Owen Hall, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Mich.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Officials at Michigan State University’s East Lansing Campus were concerned that Owen Hall, a mid-20th-century residence facility, was no longer attracting much interest from its target audience, graduate and international students.
| Oct 12, 2010
Gartner Auditorium, Cleveland Museum of Art
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Gartner Auditorium was originally designed by Marcel Breuer and completed, in 1971, as part of his Education Wing at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Despite that lofty provenance, the Gartner was never a perfect music venue.
| Oct 12, 2010
Cell and Genome Sciences Building, Farmington, Conn.
27th Annual Reconstruction Awards—Silver Award. Administrators at the University of Connecticut Health Center in Farmington didn’t think much of the 1970s building they planned to turn into the school’s Cell and Genome Sciences Building. It’s not that the former toxicology research facility was in such terrible shape, but the 117,800-sf structure had almost no windows and its interior was dark and chopped up.