This audio is automatically generated. Please let us know if you have any comments.
Editor’s Note: This story focuses on the topic of mental health and suicide. If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
In September 2021, John Gaal Sr. received an unexpected phone call from a colleague on a Saturday evening. The colleague’s son had committed suicide and he didn’t know what to do next.
Gaal, who had lost his own son, John Gaal Jr., to suicide about four years earlier, knew the feeling. In the immediate hours after the tragedy, there was no guide, no road map.
After speaking with his colleague, Gaal became a regular resource for people in those circumstances and made himself available to those whose loved ones had committed suicide. He answered eight more such calls in a 12-week stretch, and dozens more since then.
In fact, Gaal received one of those calls the night before he spoke with Construction Dive for this piece.
The director of worker wellness for the nonprofit Missouri Works Initiative, Gaal has studied suicide “postvention,” or the need to intervene for friends and family immediately after a suicide death. He has published his research on the subject in the International Journal of Vocational Education and Training.
Here, Gaal talks to Construction Dive about the notion of postvention, why the first few hours are so important, and what builders can do to make a difference.
Editor’s Note: The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Immersion in CONSTRUCTION: What is the aftermath of suicide?
MR JOHN GAAL: I often expound on the concept of the triangle. One leg is prevention, one leg is intervention and one leg is postvention. When I show it, I show the overlapping sides at the vertex of each of these corners. Intervention affects prevention, as well as postvention, etc.
In simple terms, prevention is awareness. Intervention is when someone has gone through a prevention course and asks: “Now that I know that, when I see something and hear something or observe something, how do I intervene?”
We see a lot of work in the areas of prevention and intervention, but not so much in postvention, which is the third pot of the triangle.
We also call it aftercare. What do you do with the people left behind after someone dies by suicide, possibly a loved one, co-worker, dear friend or family member?
Not much work has been done in this area. In fact, the ratio is about 40 to one for peer-reviewed research articles on prevention versus postvention.
What are these phone calls like?
None of those calls ever asked me, “John, what will I be doing in three weeks, three months, three years?” Every one of those calls said, “John, I’m in the eye of the storm. What the hell do I do now?”
People are thirsty for it. They need a protocol.
So what can people do?
In a workplace, there are four key things we want to look at in this acute phase.
Coordination is the first. We have to be very good in our communication and offer support.
Ideally, we commission a team of three or four people with a point of execution. You need someone who knows how to deal with the media because there is a journalistic protocol about suicide in the press. We can’t have four or five people sending mixed messages to the local press.
Then comes the notification: we need to make sure we’ve contacted the family, that they’ve given permission to share information and confirmed how much information they want us to share.
This is such a taboo subject in our society. Our approach is that we do not share any details about the “how” involved in death. We also use appropriate language. We don’t say “suicide”. We use the phrase “death by suicide”.
The reason we do this is because much of the language is steeped in history, tradition and religion. For example, people “commit a sin”, “commit a crime”. We need to move away from this kind of judgmental language when we talk about suicide.
We need to meet with employees, to stop the rumor mill, to encourage them to stay off social media until we have more information ready to share properly.
The third phase is communication. We have to be there in the first few hours to try to stop contagion, which is the concept that people exposed to suicide are at greater risk of dying by suicide.
Work done by the University of Kentucky in 2018 suggests that a suicide affects 135 people. This means that in a company of 150 people between the office and the field workers, we will need 150 different strategies. Because how do you process grief and how did you meet John Jr. it’s different from how I process grief and how I met John Jr.
The final phase is support. How do we help these workers? To relatives? It is very important that we address people in groups and then begin to address people individually.
How can companies and leaders be more prepared?
If you haven’t already taken steps toward suicide prevention and intervention, do so now. And then follow up with post-vention training, which is so important but often overlooked.
