The Mental Health Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight on Construction Job Sites
I’m currently at the Construction Mental Health conference in Portland, Oregon. This conference places emphasis on suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention. You may be asking why we are so focused on the Construction industry. It’s because people are dying at an alarming rate. If you want to understand how bad things have gotten in the construction industry, consider this: in 2022, approximately 6,000 construction workers died by suicide. That same year, around 1,000 died from on-the-job accidents.
Read that again. Six times more workers died by suicide than from all construction fatalities combined.
We believe the data in 2025 will be much higher.
The construction industry has spent decades perfecting safety protocols to prevent falls, electrocutions, and equipment accidents. Hard hats. Steel-toed boots. Safety harnesses. OSHA compliance. All of it important. All of it saving lives. And yet the leading cause of death for construction workers has nothing to do with any of those things.
41.9 per 100,000The suicide rate among construction workers in 2024 — still over 4x the national average and 4x the rate of on-the-job deaths. (CPWR, 2025)
The construction industry’s culture of toughness — the same culture that produces reliable, resilient, talented workers — has become its own liability. Asking for help on a job site carries social weight it shouldn’t. You’re supposed to be strong. You’re supposed to push through. You figure it out or you keep it to yourself.
A 2025 study surveying more than 2,000 construction workers found that 64% had experienced anxiety or depression in the past 12 months. That’s a 10-point jump from the year before. The crisis isn’t getting better. It’s getting worse.
Why PeerSupport Works Differently Here
The construction industry has a characteristic that makes traditional mental health resources nearly useless: the workforce is mobile. Workers move from site to site, city to city, job to job. They don’t have a consistent HR department. They don’t have a therapist who knows their situation. And they certainly aren’t going to call an 800 number to talk to a stranger.
But they will talk to someone who has driven a truck, poured concrete, or worked a 14-hour shift. Someone who knows what it feels like when the project goes sideways and the pressure to deliver becomes crushing. Someone who has been through a divorce or a substance problem or just hit a wall and didn’t know what to do.
That’s the PeerSupport difference. It’s not clinical. It’s human.
“One thing that all leaders need to do is model vulnerability. If you’re vulnerable first, it gives people the license to say: my leader took a mental health day. It must be okay for me to do the same." — Industry leader, quoted in Construction Dive
The good news: things are moving. Drug overdose deaths among construction workers dropped 28.8% in 2024, driven in large part by reduced stigma and expanded peer support and recovery programs. The suicide rate dropped too — modestly, by 1.7%. Progress that took years of work.
The goal for 2026 is to accelerate that progress. Not just with awareness campaigns. With access.
Healthtek PeerSupport can be integrated into a company’s existing Healthtek Hub or run as a standalone platform — meaning it goes wherever the workers are, available on any device, no login required, completely anonymous.
For an industry where many workers don’t trust institutions, the anonymity piece is everything.
Partnered with Livwell
Kaitlin Daeges, CEO of LivWell Partners said, "We've made incredible connections and formed real partnerships while at The Construction Mental Health & Wellness Conference. Partnering with Healthtek as our technology vendor has made a powerful one-two punch for industry leaders."
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