Providing resources for suicide prevention and promoting mental health in construction is vital for the industry. However, knowing how to respond in the hours after a tragedy also is important and often overlooked.
Construction Dive spoke with John Gaal Sr., director of worker wellness at the nonprofit Missouri Works Initiative, about “postvention”—the need to intervene for friends and family immediately following a death by suicide. Gaal lost his son to suicide and has studied suicide postvention, as well as published research regarding the topic in the International Journal of Vocational Education and Training.
Gaal said it can be difficult to know what to do with the people left after someone dies by suicide, and workplaces often are seeking a protocol to address it.
In a workplace setting, Gaal said the following four key things should be considered soon after tragedy strikes.
- Coordination. Effectively communicating and offering support is crucial. Gaal said: “Ideally, we task a team of three or four people with running point. You need one person that knows how to engage with the media because there’s journalistic protocol on suicide in the press. We can’t have four or five people sending mixed messages to the local press.”
- Notification. Gaal highlights the importance of contacting the family and receiving permission to share information, including how much information can be shared. Employers then meet with employees to quash rumors and encourage them to stay away from social media until information can be properly shared. He said: “Our approach is, we don’t share any details about the ‘how’ involved in the death. We also use proper language. We don’t say ‘committed suicide.’ We use the phrase ‘died by suicide.’”
- Communication. Gaal said it is important to “be there during the first few hours in an attempt to stop contagion, which is the concept that people exposed to suicide have increased risk of dying by suicide themselves.” People process grief differently, so numerous strategies will be needed when communicating with employees.
- Support. Consider how to offer help to workers and family members. Gaal said it is important to “address people in a group and then start addressing people as individuals.”
Gaal recommends companies add postvention training to their suicide prevention and intervention training.
NRCA offers mental health resources at betoughenough.org, including free suicide prevention training for NRCA member companies.
