Pleune Service Company stands with our coworkers, families, and industry peers during Construction Suicide Prevention Week, taking place September 8–12, 2025. We honor those affected by these deeply personal issues by raising awareness, sharing resources, and hosting a company-wide webinar on September 11 to foster open conversation and support. Our commitment is simple: to ensure everyone in our community feels seen, supported, and never alone when facing hard times. This month, we’re encouraging everyone, not just those in construction, to build connection. Check in with a colleague. Ask your neighbor how they’re doing. Talk to the person next to you in line. And when they answer, really listen. Show up the way you’d want others to show up for you. That’s how we build something that lasts together.
Suicide Prevention in the Construction Industry
Every day, more construction workers die by suicide in the United States than from falls or heavy machinery. It’s something that no safety harness or helmet can protect against and often mental health struggles carried in silence. It’s a crisis hiding in plain sight, and its high time we shatter the silence.
According to the CDC, construction and extraction workers suffer suicide rates far above the norm. Demographically, construction work rests largely on the shoulders of middle‑aged men, who already carry the highest national suicide rates. Adding in the industry’s chronic job insecurity, grueling hours, physical pain, and a culture that prizes stoicism, and you’ve created a breeding ground for suffering without relief. In Michigan alone, that rate climbed to 67.8 per 100,000 people in 2022.1 That year 175 construction workers lost their lives to suicide, prompting MIOSHA and state labor groups to urge employers across Michigan to break the taboo, bring mental health into safety conversations, and equip the workforce with real pathways to help.
It’s not enough to prevent falls or mandate hard hats. This is about mental well‑being, too. OSHA’s Construction Suicide Prevention Week, held annually in September, rings that alarm loud and clear. OSHA provides resources like their “Suicide Prevention: Five Things You Should Know” campaign, encouraging employers and peers to be aware, pay attention, reach out, take action, and keep learning. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention even forged an official alliance with OSHA to amplify these messages and equip workplaces with the flattened stigma and tools to intervene early.
There’s no diagnostic machine to screen for suicide risk. The only way in is conversation. Notice when a coworker seems isolated or moody. Statistics show that people struggling often don’t ask for help. They’re waiting for someone to notice the withdrawal, notice the mood shift, to ask the hard question: “Are you okay?”. Trust matters, if leaders openly place mental health on safety agendas, workers feel more able to speak up. Safety professionals and leaders who already protect physical health can be just as powerful protecting psychological health.
If you want to learn more about these issues and how OSHA and the state of Michigan are combating suicide in the industry check out some of these links.
https://www.preventconstructionsuicide.com/
https://constructionsuicideprevention.com/
https://www.michigan.gov/leo/news/2024/09/13/miosha-construction-suicide-prevention-week