It’s Time to Talk about Mental Health Awareness in the AEC Industry
For the last few years, mental health has become a subject near and dear to me for a few different reasons. If mental health wasn’t on your radar before the COVID-19 pandemic, it came to the forefront as we, as a world, dealt with disease and isolation. But even before the pandemic, things started happening around me that made me make mental health a priority for me and my team.
Mental Health Struggles are All Around Us
A few years ago, I lost a coworker at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) who took their own life. It was a shock to all of us who knew them. There were no tell-tale signs. They seemed happy, they were fun to be around and they were a great employee. Not long after that, an employee who worked for me considered taking their own life – fortunately, we were able to intervene – and another employee struggling with PTSD was also struggling at work.
All these things were happening, and I couldn’t help but think of how ill-equipped I felt as a colleague, supervisor and friend to respond. I’m an engineer. We like our subjects to be black and white, for our problems to all have clean solutions. But this subject matter is very gray, every situation is different and there isn’t always a solution or completion point. These are just a few reasons why talking about mental health can take us way out of our comfort zones.
I knew I wasn’t the only person struggling on how to deal with mental health and people around me who were struggling. The more I started talking to colleagues, the more of their own stories I heard. Not a single person told me “I never had any of these experiences.” In fact, many told me stories beyond what I ever expected.
Even still, we don’t talk enough about the experiences we have. Mental health is not a subject we bring up too often, mostly because of the stigma attached to it.
领英推荐
We Have to Start Somewhere
When we started our journey at FHWA to create a mental health awareness plan, all we were trying to do was identify tools for supervisors. I knew we had people suffering, and I knew there were more people like me who didn’t know what to do to help people.
We started hosting webinars and brought in people to share their stories. Soon we had leaders and senior officials in our industry telling their stories and being vulnerable to their peers. It was powerful.
When the pandemic hit, everyone started struggling with their own mental health. They wanted to talk, and they wanted to have opportunities to get together and share their experiences. Suddenly, our efforts were really taking off. I was getting emails directly from some of our 2,700 employees just to say how much they appreciated what we were doing. One worker emailed me and said these efforts saved their life.
This article was originally published on rsandh.com by Thomas Everett