Big Brew event raises awareness of mental health crisis

Despite all the publicity around mental health in the construction industry, raising awareness remains the biggest challenge. During Fix Radio’s Mental Health Week, Peter Cape, charity trustee and wellbeing lead, Band of Builders joined Clive Holland to discuss its Big Brew events running throughout October.

Clive Holland: What are some of the objectives of the Big Brew event?

Peter Cape: The Big Brew is a campaign that we launched last year that is about raising awareness of mental health issues in construction and providing opportunities to access support.

It is not a fund-raising campaign. It is simply about getting the information out there, and giving people an opportunity to take a minute, have a conversation, and get access to support that is available [and] they don’t necessarily know about.

Holland: Have you noticed more people looking stressed out?

Cape: One of our Big Brew mantras is that it is OK to talk.

I find consistently that over the last few years, as I have opened myself up to that question I am having that conversation a lot with guys.

I was at a Big Brew event last week [and] a lift engineer comes in, you ask the how question ‘how are you doing?’ and he immediately opened up about a business colleague who committed suicide a couple of weeks before.

It is difficult to say if it is more or less because I am having that conversation a lot.?

Holland: You’re in your second year of the big brew campaign, what have you learnt after the first year and how have you applied those lessons this year?

Cape: Last year we had a lot of events, and we attached fundraising to those events.?

This year we have changed that around. We have changed the way we fundraise. It is now not directly linked to the Big Brew events. We want the event to be purely about awareness.

We have also come to the conclusion that we can offer a service – we offer the counselling service, which is fully funded and free to anyone in the construction industry and the text helpline. Those are services we think people want – we don’t know that.

So this year, alongside the Big Brew we are doing a piece of research about what services people will use, so we can target our services at the people that need them.