Update
How ENR Suicide Prevention and Safety Coverage Evolves
About six years ago I retrieved my friend’s two rifles and a shotgun from storage and took temporary ownership of them as a favor. I liked them and shot them a few times, taking care to practice gun safety each time I did. As for safe storage, that was another story. I shoved the guns and their cases under my bed and kept the ammunition in a night table.
Thinking back, what I was doing wasn’t only learning how to shoot or appreciate the design and functioning of these weapons, which had once belonged to my friend’s father. I wanted to tap into a cultural segment by joining the significant number of Americans who keep or use guns for recreation or security. But I hadn’t yet ever thought of firearm access as part of construction safety.
Around this same time I was writing about the changing ideas of how to protect construction workers and promote jobsite safety—for decades an important part of my ENR responsibilities. Those ideas had evolved considerably, first with behavioral safety having made progress and then with predictive analytics holding promise of further improvements.
Other things were also changing. In 2016, I wrote a feature called “The Dignity Dividend,” about promoting a caring jobsite culture where craftworkers were treated well and expected also to look out for the safety of one another. These trends were influenced by and fed into other safety idea currents, such as prevention through design, and human and occupational performance approaches.
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Meanwhile, my colleagues at ENR were writing about the evolving opioid epidemic and mental health challenges afflicting construction-sector workers and others. Employers, for better or worse, were taking more responsibility for the safety and well-being of their too-small pool of available craftworkers. Mental health and suicide had become a talking point in the safety agenda, yet I was preoccupied mainly with accidents and how they occurred.
This week’s cover story on the lethal means aspect of suicide represents not just the evolving ideas about the blurring border between work and private life but also a change in my own perspective on safety and firearms.
Major construction sector companies have embraced these ideas faster than I have. National Construction Safety Week, set for May 4-8 this year, has previously made mental health and wellness its theme. This issue’s cover story is partly meant to provoke us to ask, “How far would I go for someone I thought was at risk for suicide? Would I be able to recognize the risk factors and take up the issue of firearms access in a way that could help save a life?”
I hope the story clarifies those issues for you and elevates firearms access as an important part of suicide prevention.
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