The suicide rate among construction workers runs several times the national average — in Canada, roughly 41.9 per 100,000 against a national figure near 11.8, more than four deaths by suicide for every on-site fatality from an accident. That is not a wellness statistic. It is a safety statistic, and it belongs on the same board as fall protection and lockout-tagout. On Atlantic Construction Podcast episode 68, former NHL goaltender Corey Hirsch laid out why the silence that produces those numbers is itself a hazard — and why the fix is operational, not sentimental.
What does a five-times-the-average number actually mean on a job site?
Numbers like that get repeated until they go numb, so it is worth holding the comparison still for a second. The general working population sits near the national baseline. Construction sits far above it, and the deaths by suicide outnumber the deaths from falls, struck-bys, and caught-betweens that every safety program is built to prevent. The trade has spent decades engineering out the physical risks. The risk that now kills more of its people than the scaffolds do has, until recently, had no controls written for it at all.
Hirsch put the choice to operators directly. "the suicide rates of construction is five times the national average five times right so do you want to be a tough guy and possibly have a suicide on your on your you know where in inside your company or whatever because you wanted to have a tough guy mentality" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). The framing matters because it moves the question off the worker and onto the culture. A man who is struggling did not cause the five-times number. A workplace where he cannot say so did.
The data underneath the anecdote has gotten sharper. A December 2025 Canadian Construction Association survey found one in three construction workers report poor mental health, and 83 percent have experienced moderate-to-severe depression or anxiety. This is not a fringe of the crew. It is most of the crew, carrying something, mostly in silence. The question for any owner or foreman in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI, or Newfoundland and Labrador is whether the job site they run makes that silence easier or harder to break.
Can success protect you from the silence trap?
Hirsch's own story is the answer, and it is a hard one. He reached the top of his profession — an Olympic silver medal, a Stanley Cup ring — while privately falling apart from undiagnosed OCD. None of the achievement reached the thing that was hurting him. "I always just felt like I couldn't tell anybody or talk to anybody" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68), he said, describing the certainty that disclosure would end his career before it gave him relief. He believed that admitting it would get him labelled, sidelined, finished.
The cost of that belief was concrete. "I suffered for three or four years in silence until basically I was to the point where it was either go get help or take my own life" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). The body kept score along the way. "it took its toll eventually I lost 30 pounds I couldn't eat you know and it took me down it took away a very promising NHL career for me" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). The point he draws from it is not that he was uniquely fragile. It is the opposite: no amount of toughness, talent, or external validation immunized him, and it will not immunize a journeyman who has never missed a shift.
He is just as clear about the counterfactual, which is where the operational lesson lives. "if I could have gotten help right away went to the doctor knowing what it was got help right away I'd have a lot longer NHL career" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). Early help was not weakness. It was the move that would have preserved the career. The years of hiding were the expensive part. That reframe — that asking early is the strong, self-interested choice — is the one a construction culture has the hardest time hearing, and the one it most needs to.
Why is the trade wired for this in particular?
Construction concentrates the risk factors. The workforce is overwhelmingly male, the environment is physically dangerous, and the social glue is banter — the kind of busting that bonds a crew but also polices what a man is allowed to admit. Hirsch came up through professional hockey, a dressing room with the same wiring, and he names the structural identity between the two. The fear is the same fear: speak up and you are seen as a liability, the career is on the line, the paycheque is on the line, so you say nothing and you carry it.
Layer in the Atlantic-specific stressors and the picture gets heavier. Much of the regional workforce is rural and small-town, and the Canadian Mental Health Association's New Brunswick profile records the highest provincial suicide rate in the country at 13.8 per 100,000, with 49.1 percent of the population living rurally — a baseline risk that sits underneath the trade's own already-high rate. The Nova Scotia–specific CSNS Creating Mentally Healthy Workplaces study of 1,171 workers found 26 percent regularly use alcohol or drugs to cope, and that workers in high-stress environments are up to 60 percent more likely to be involved in a workplace incident. That last figure is the bridge from feelings to safety: distress and incidents travel together.
Where does mental health become a compliance issue rather than a feelings issue?
This is the reframe that earns the article its title, and Hirsch makes it without flinching into sentiment. He treats a struggling co-worker not as a charity case but as a variable in the day's risk assessment. "if I'm gonna make fun or shame someone into not getting help that doesn't help me at work that makes my job more dangerous" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). The self-interest is the point. The guy beside you who is not okay is not your problem to feel sorry for; he is a condition on the site that affects whether you go home with all your fingers.
From there the open-door policy stops being an HR nicety and becomes a control measure. "have an open door policy because it affects everybody and construction jobs are dangerous" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68), he said, and then closed the loop on the supervisor's duty: "you're actually encouraging a safety issue right like you're you're you're you're not doing your job in that sense which is to make the workplace safe" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). Read that as written. Pushing a man down instead of toward help is not neutral. It is a failure of the safety mandate the supervisor already holds. The open-door policy, in this reading, is PPE for the mind — and the duty to provide it sits with the same person who signs off on the fall plan.
He extends it to the financially stressed worker, which is most of a seasonal trades crew. The worry about bills is not the danger. The danger is what an untreated stress load does to attention. "if they're stressed out to the point where they're making the job dangerous because you're not you know you're bullying people or not getting them into help" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68), the situation gets worse for the whole crew, not just the one man. Bullying does not toughen a site. It degrades it.
What does the buddy system actually look like at shift start?
The practical version is not a poster or a lanyard. It is one person on the crew deciding to be reachable. Hirsch does not ask anyone to stop being who they are. "just check in with your buddies" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68), he said — keep the busting, keep the chirps, that is the bond. The shift is additive, not subtractive: "be that guy that can that can bust on his buddies but that can also be the guy that you're the first person that they're they're come to" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). You can be both. Most good foremen already are; they just have not named the second role out loud.
The tell to watch for is the one the trade already half-knows. When someone's drinking or using ramps up, that is rarely the problem itself; it is the visible edge of a problem being managed alone. The CSNS study quantified the link — workers who use substances to cope are 157 percent more likely to report poor mental health — and the Institute for Work and Health has flagged that self-employed and owner-operator workers in particular show higher drug-related risk, consistent with managing pain through substances rather than presenting for care. For a region thick with sole proprietors and small crews, that is the worker least likely to have anyone checking in at all.
Who sets the floor, and how?
Leaders do, and not by issuing a memo. The single highest-impact lever the CSNS research found was the supervisor who models openness himself: 33 percent of workplace stress is linked to manager interactions, and a positive manager relationship cuts turnover risk by 45 percent. The mechanism is example, not instruction. Hirsch frames it through his own kids, but it transfers cleanly to a crew. He says he has set the example for them that it is okay to go get help (Corey Hirsch, EP 68) — and people follow the example that is set, for better or worse. A super who has openly seen someone gives every man on the site quiet permission to do the same.
The vehicle already exists. The toolbox talk — the five-to-fifteen-minute pre-shift huddle that every site runs for physical hazards — is exactly the low-friction format for normalizing a mental-health check-in, and Construction Safety Nova Scotia publishes dedicated mental-health toolbox talks for that purpose. Host Daniel Arsenault, who came up through the trades, added the operator's own version of the same humility on the episode: "I've had lots of lots of struggles with anxiety and depression and so many people do" (Daniel Arsenault, EP 68), and "once you learn to ask for help it's it's humbling it kind of makes you a better person" (Daniel Arsenault, EP 68). When the person running the meeting can say that, the floor is set. The same digital discipline a tool like Procore brings to documenting site safety can be pointed at logging and normalizing these check-ins, so the conversation becomes routine rather than exceptional.
Why are secrets the most dangerous thing on the site?
Because silence does not stay neutral; it actively generates a worse story. "secrets are toxic and people make up their own assumptions" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68), Hirsch said. A man who goes quiet and grim is read by his crew as cold, checked-out, or not caring — when the truth is that he is drowning. Disclosure corrects the record. "when you let people know hey I'm struggling they have a lot more compassion and empathy than than not knowing at all" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). The crew was never the threat. The not-knowing was.
He carries the same logic to going public, and reframes it as an act of leadership rather than exposure. "when you share your story it actually helps someone else open up" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68) — one disclosure opens the door to the next. "that's how we're going to help people that's how we're going to make change by making it okay you know to ask" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). Telling your own story is not the weakness the dressing-room culture says it is. It is the intervention. Hirsch also spoke about losing someone he loved to suicide — "I had a girlfriend that took her own life and I'll tell you what it's the worst thing that can ever happen to anybody" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68) — and that loss is the weight under everything else he says. This is not abstract for him.
What does Atlantic Canada add to the risk, and what is finally being built to meet it?
The regional context almost certainly understates the national picture. Construction here is structurally seasonal — roughly 42,000 seasonal workers across Atlantic Canada and Quebec were eligible for federal EI top-ups, including about 7,700 in Nova Scotia — which means an annual cycle of layoff, income uncertainty, and idle winter months layered onto everything above. Add geographic isolation, long hauls to remote sites, and thin rural mental-health infrastructure: the average wait to see a specialist ran around seven months in 2024, and psychiatrist access in rural areas can exceed a year, with one in ten Canadians waiting more than four months even for community counselling. When help is that far away, people wait until crisis. The geography itself is part of the hazard, the same way it shapes the region's supply chain and site logistics.
The encouraging part is that the infrastructure is catching up, province by province. The table below is a starting map for an operator deciding where to point a struggling worker today.
| Province | What changed / what's available | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Nova Scotia | WCB now compensates gradual-onset stress (since Sept 1, 2024); CSNS + MERIT launched Anchor Point, a free member assistance program for small contractors without EAP | Windley Ely; CSNS |
| New Brunswick | WorkSafeNB SUCCEED: six weeks of counselling on claim application, before approval; new psychological health resource centre (June 2026) | WorkSafeNB |
| PEI | WCB expanded psychological-injury coverage to include workplace-harassment harm (Jan 1, 2025) | CBC PEI |
The structural gap these programs are closing is real and worth naming plainly: a U.S. report cited by CSNS found the construction suicide rate more than twice the general population, and no Atlantic-specific occupational breakdown is yet published — the small trades contractor who employs most of the region's workforce has historically had the least access of anyone. Anchor Point and the WCB expansions are aimed squarely at that worker. For the broader picture of the people who build this region, see the workforce and people hub.
The ask: what to do, and what not to wait for
If you take one thing from EP 68, take Hirsch's frame, because it dissolves the shame without softening the seriousness. "I didn't get to the NHL because I decided to just do it all on my own I had coaches right" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68) who helped him along the way. He had a coach to get better at goaltending, and he treats the brain the same way — mental health is the same thing, he says: "you don't have to sit there and suffer and do it all on your own" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). You got coaching to learn your trade. Getting coaching for your head is the same prudent, professional move — not a confession.
The practical path he gives is short. Start with the doctor. "the first place you go is your doctor right your doctor has seen all of it" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68) — and there is no novelty in it for them — the doctor is not going to look at you like you have three heads if you say you are suffering, Hirsch says; they have seen and heard it all, far worse than you can explain (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). From there, the programs exist where they did not a few years ago — Anchor Point in Nova Scotia, SUCCEED in New Brunswick, expanded WCB coverage across the region — and as Hirsch put it, "there are programs now available and just get in touch with them" (Corey Hirsch, EP 68). If you are a foreman, run the check-in like a toolbox talk and watch for the man whose drinking is climbing. If you are the one carrying it, the on-the-record takeaway from EP 68 is the strongest thing in it: asking early is not the day you broke. It is the day you protected your career, your crew, and yourself — and that is the same job as keeping the site safe.
If you or someone on your crew is in crisis, in Canada you can call or text 9-8-8 (Suicide Crisis Helpline), any time, free.