AASHTO Journal - Michigan DOT Podcast Focuses on Worker Mental Health

A recent edition of the “Talking Michigan Transportation” podcast focused on the mental health challenges faced by the workers who build and maintain roads and bridges not just in Michigan but across the nation as a whole.

[Above image by the Michigan DOT]

That podcast – produced by the Michigan Department of Transportation – featured Gregg Brunner, Michigan DOT’s chief engineer and chief operations officer, who spoke about the issue as part of a knowledge session convened by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials at the organization’s 2024 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

As someone who has spent a career focusing on the safety of the transportation system and work zones, Brunner said his “interest in making improvements” in worker mental health came about as he pored over crash reports and visited highway crash scenes; learning about the toll crashes, especially where road construction is occurring, takes on the highway workers.

“I went out to lots of crashes and incidents. I saw lots of bad things, things that kept me up at night,” Brunner explained on the podcast. “You know, I realized there’s a lot more that goes on to these crashes. There’s the personal impacts, the folks that are impacted out there.”

He added that he then started thinking of what the Michigan DOT had been through in the last four or five years. “I started thinking about just the number of suicides that have happened in the department,” he said. “I was so concerned about making sure people wore their hard hat, I wasn’t really thinking about what was going on under their hard hat. So, again, this is something that’s not just a Michigan-type thing or Michigan DOT thing. This is something that’s going on nationally. Right now, that’s being talked about, which is why I was pleased to see it happen nationally at that AASHTO conference recently.”

Some of the statistics discussed at that AASHTO knowledge session include:

Overall, suicides in the U.S. increased to 49,300 in 2023, up from 48,183 since just 2021. In the construction industry, an estimated 5,000 workers died by suicide in 2022, which climbed to 7,000 by 2023. By contrast, the industry loses an estimated 1,000 annually to construction site incidents.
In Michigan, a construction worker is now 12 times more likely to die by suicide rather than due to an on-the-job injury.
There is a 75 percent remission rate for mental health and even substance abuse issues if one stays engaged six months to a year in a treatment plan.

“When you start talking about physical health, people are fine to tell you ‘I broke my wrist or my sore throat or hurt my knee’ or whatever happened. But it [mental health] is not like that. When you start talking about mental health, there’s just a stigma associated to that,” Brunner said.

“And what I’m trying to do is just start the conversation,” he stressed. “Again, I’m an engineer. I’m not trained to be a social worker or counselor or therapist like that. I’m just an engineer that’s trained to find solutions. So the best thing I can do, I think, is just start the conversation, get people talking about it so that they can get the help they need.”