The part that follows you home

Yesterday was World Suicide Prevention Day, and next week, the fourteenth through the eighteenth, is Construction Suicide Prevention Week. We are not going to send you a ribbon. This is what we think is underneath the number, and what we have built to do something about it.

Where the number comes from

Men working in construction die by suicide at a rate of about 56 per 100,000 a year. For men across all industries it is about 32. That is CDC data out of the National Vital Statistics System, and it is the reason we exist rather than some other outfit.

The usual answer is that the work is dangerous and the men are stoic, and both of those are true, but neither one closes a gap that size.

What the job does to the house

What we keep coming back to is the part that follows you home. You leave before they are up, you get back after they are down, you miss the game and the appointment and the third thing you promised, and the argument at nine at night is not really about the dishes. Researchers call that work-family conflict, and men who report a lot of it are more likely to have thoughts of suicide, with depression looking like part of how the one leads to the other.

That finding comes out of a community study in Australia rather than off a jobsite, so we are borrowing it, and it is the best thing anybody has put numbers to so far.

Most of it is logistics

Here is the part that decided what we built. A lot of what makes a man impossible to live with after a fourteen hour day is a pile of unhandled logistics. He has not slept more than five hours in a month. He could not come up with two thousand dollars if the truck threw a rod. The move to the next job is going to drop his kid off a therapy waitlist and nobody has called the new district yet. None of that is a mood, all of it comes home with him, and every piece of it can be handled by somebody doing the boring work of handling it.

So Rebar is a list of things you can actually do. It asks what is going on and gives you back a short punchlist, and the items are things like protecting a sleep window, or getting one month of cushion in the bank before you try for three. It is free, it runs on any phone, and nothing on it reaches an employer, because the answers stay on the phone unless somebody ticks a box to share a count with no name attached.

Whether it moves anything we do not know yet, because it only went live on the eleventh of August, and we will tell you what we find even if what we find is not much.

https://rebar.getbuilt.org

The retreat, and what we find out there

Rebar is for taking friction out of an ordinary Tuesday, and the BUILT Family Retreat is for what a few years of those Tuesdays has already done to a family. Six days and five nights in Colorado next summer, for construction families, with focused sessions for the adults and age appropriate programs for the kids running alongside them. It is fully funded through sponsors and donors, so a family covers its own travel and nothing else. Lodging, meals, activities and the therapy sessions if you want them are all included, and we will announce the location once it is nailed down.

It is also where we start learning something of our own. With their say so, we want to follow the families who come to us for two years, and track what actually moved the needle for them and what did not. Everything above was measured on somebody else and we will keep using it. This part gets measured on the people we are actually here for, and it takes two years because two years is how long it takes.

Next week

Put the app in front of your crews during the week. That is the whole ask, and a QR code on the gang box does more than a poster in the trailer.

We are also looking for volunteer peer supporters. Native Spanish speakers would help a lot right now, because Rebar runs in English, Spanish and Arabic while the peer support only runs in English so far, but everyone is welcome and you do not need a background in any of this. We train you on how we do it, and we put you into a supporters group of your own, so the people doing the listening have somebody listening to them too. Reply to this one and I will get you the details.

Josh