By Shannon Steffke
Every September, mental health shows up on the industry calendar. It is National Suicide Prevention Month, and for a few weeks the skilled trades talk openly about a subject they usually keep quiet. The posters go up and a hotline number gets shared. But by the time October rolls around, the topic tends to fade.
At Alder, the conversation does not run on a calendar. It is something we have kept front and center year-round, because the need does not take eleven months off. While September is a good reminder, it’s not the full story: the standard version of the mental health message often misses the people it is meant to reach.
The problem with ‘tell your supervisor’
Most of the mental health awareness effort runs through supervisors, who are asked to watch their crews for warning signs and to be the person workers turn to. But that can be a problem because the people who are struggling usually don’t feel comfortable telling their “boss.”
A review of the most-studied suicide prevention program in the trades found that workers consistently named supervisors as the least trusted resource for mental health concerns. The same review found that the approaches that actually worked, the ones that improved mental health awareness and cut through stigma, did so because they were built worker to worker. People opened up to a trained crewmate long before they opened up to a manager.
None of this means the supervisor does not matter. It means the opposite. A good leader keeps the door open every day, and also understands that some workers will still find it easier to share with a peer than to anyone above them on the crew. That is not a failure of leadership. Rank and vulnerability sit awkwardly together, and the worker beside you does not carry any of that weight. They know the shift you just worked because they worked it too.
So the job of a supervisor is about more than simply being available. It is making sure that if a worker cannot come to them, the worker still has someone. The message a good leader sends down the line is simple: if it is not me, let it be someone you trust here, but do not carry it alone.
The scale of what gets missed is easy to underestimate. Construction workers make up only about 7.4 percent of the U.S. workforce, but they account for nearly 18 percent of suicide deaths where the industry was known. That is not a poster problem. It is a trust problem, and the answer is to build trust everywhere on the team, not just at the top.
The foundation of a good crew
That instinct is where Alder started. Ali Munzer built the company in 2020 on a background most safety leaders do not share, in education and counseling. She came in with a conviction that how you treat people is not separate from how well the work gets done. It is the foundation the work stands on.
That belief shapes daily operations. When a team trusts each other, they catch the small things early, the quiet signals that someone is slipping before it becomes something bigger. When there is no trust, those signs get missed. The strength of that team is part of the safety system, and it is built the same way trust is always built, through how people are treated day after day.
It’s also good for business. The care that keeps a worker steady is what keeps a crew sharp, and a sharp crew is a safer one.
Where the noticing happens
Think about the environment of work across the trades.Long shifts, physical strain, and stretches of repetition that leave a person alone with their thoughts. On an airfield, that might be a crew guiding vehicles across taxiway crossings while staying in contact with the tower. On a job site, it is something else. The details change, but the pressures are the same. Research on aviation ground crews found that psychological stress is closely tied to lower well-being, and that social support is one of the strongest buffers against it.
Social support is not a program you roll out, it is built into how a crew works. The teams that get it right tend to do a few ordinary things exceptionally well.
They bring new workers onto a team instead of handing them a vest and pointing at a spot, because a person who feels like part of a crew has someone close enough to notice when something is off. They treat short, frequent breaks as part of doing the job well, not time taken from it. And they make speaking up normal, whether it is a hazard on the ground or a weight someone is carrying. The goal is to make talking about difficult things feel like an ordinary part of the shift.
That kind of noticing is a soft skill, and it is the one most likely to catch a problem while it is still small.
September is the reminder. Every day is the standard.
The trades tend to put physical safety first. Gear and checklists are second nature, and on the best sites they are non-negotiable. But mental health has not become as automatic. The harder part is the one that never shows up on an inspection: whether a worker feels safe enough to say “I’m not doing okay” and trust that the person next to them will actually hear it.
That kind of safety is not built with a single effort in September. It comes from the ordinary way people on a crew look out for one another, on every shift, all year. The month is a good time to say it out loud. The better goal is to make it the standard the other eleven months, too.