Hunter Fisk was barely 20 years old when he found his calling as a lineman and a home in Diamond Bar, Calif., Local 47.

“He was so, so proud. He felt like he’d arrived,” his mother, Shana Fisk, said. “He had his dream job. He was part of a brotherhood. Guys told us repeatedly how funny he was, how witty he was, how he’d drop a one-liner in class and everyone would burst into laughter.”

At age 22, outwardly in good spirits but masking relationship pain, Hunter ended his life. For his closeknit family, friends and co-workers, the shock and enduring grief are incalculable.

Their agony is widely shared in the building trades and utility work, where suicide and drug overdoses are claiming more lives than ever, outpacing the U.S. average for all working people.

“We’ve done a lot over the decades to improve on safety in the workplace itself, which is vital,” said Local 47 Business Manager Colin Lavin. “But I think we kind of missed that other side — how people are doing in their regular life and the struggles they bring to work. And so how do we help in that space?”

Between 2019 and 2024, Lavin lost 22 members to drugs and 20 to suicide. Other large locals also report double-digit tragedies, and none is immune.

Across the U.S. and Canada, locals increasingly are treating the situation as the emergency it is. From workshops to peer-to-peer support and other approaches that go beyond giving someone the phone number for employee assistance, members and staff are learning to recognize signs of trouble, build trust, and encourage struggling co-workers to take life-saving steps toward healing.

For Milwaukee Local 2150 Business Manager Jim Meyer, the wake-up call came a few years ago when a 52-year-old lineman took his own life.

“That’s kind of where our focus started, because you look back in hindsight and ask yourself if there were warning signs,” Meyer said. “I realized we didn’t know how to provide the best help.”

He put mental health on the agenda at meetings and conferences, and in May convened unit chairs and vice chairs for a statewide training session where he and his staff had a success story to share: how outreach, empathy, follow-up and union-employer cooperation pulled a veteran lineman back from the brink last year.

“He wasn’t himself,” said Local 2150 business agent Scott Reineck. “He was avoiding work. He was struggling with decision-making, just all kinds of different things that weren’t his norm.”

Reineck and others began visiting the man at home. “It probably took about a month to get him to understand that everybody’s trying to help him,” he said. “But we finally did get through to him.”

INTERNATIONAL leaders and staff also are making mental health a top priority, jarred by research showing that construction workers suffer some of the highest rates of anxiety and depression and the lowest rates of seeking help.

“The number-one job of the IBEW is our members’ safety, doing everything in our power so they can go home healthy and whole every day,” International President Kenneth W. Cooper said. “That absolutely includes mental health, even if we haven’t always talked about it openly and directly. Well, those days are over.”

A preliminary study published last September by the research arm of North America’s Building Trades Unions found that just 5% of trades workers had consulted a mental health professional, compared to 22% for the general population.

The industry’s demands, dangers and feast-or-famine instability — long days for weeks on end, then no jobs for a period — feed workers’ stress, as do lonely stretches away from home for traveling trades workers and utility crews doing storm restoration.

Those tensions can create or pile on to personal troubles that workers commonly bury, fearing they will appear weak or put their job at risk in an industry that values strength and grit.

In Hunter Fisk’s case, he talked about relationship problems at work but hid the ways he felt humiliated. “He told them things that guys can relate to like, ‘We were up fighting all night,’ but not about the shame,” Shana Fisk said.

Helping IBEW brothers and sisters get past stigma, shame and other roadblocks to recovery is a key component of training, which typically follows a decades-old framework developed for suicide prevention among police and firefighters.

“We need to start a conversation that’s louder and stronger than it is now,” said International Representative Jim Watson, who runs workshops on mental health. “You can’t make things worse by talking about it.”

Meyer drives home that point with his Local 2150 members and staff, whether or not they’ve been through training.

“Everybody’s always afraid of saying the wrong thing,” he said. “I hear from people all the time: ‘Well, I don’t want to go up and bug that guy, because the worst thing that could happen is that I walk up and he doesn’t have a problem. He’s a just having a bad day.’”

In fact, Meyer tells them, that’s the best-case scenario — annoying someone who turns out to be otherwise fine.

“Somebody taught me this, and it’s one of the most profound things I’ve ever heard,” he said. “The worst thing that can happen is that you’re right. Because that means this guy’s in crisis.”

JAY FRASIER knows the pain from both sides. The director of Boston Local 103’s recovery and sobriety program, he suffered a breakdown and sought help after the local lost three journeyman wiremen in less than two weeks in 2023.

One man hanged himself just hours after speaking with Frasier. Another took a fatal dose of drugs while Frasier tried in vain to talk him down by phone. Then he noticed a member missing from his recovery group. Unknowingly, the man had taken a pain pill laced with a deadly amount of fentanyl.

Frasier, also a journeyman wireman, stopped eating and sleeping, eventually collapsing on his kitchen floor. For two hours, he struggled to call for help. “The phone felt like it weighed a thousand pounds,” he said.

His path back began with Local 103’s employee assistance plan. EAPs are confidential, free or low-cost programs through employers and unions that help people begin to address personal, job and substance use problems.

Next, Frasier took the difficult step of seeing a psychologist. Despite years counseling others, he felt self-conscious and worried that the receptionist was judging him.

But he stuck with it and now shares his story widely, helping construction workers see that they are no more immune to emotional trauma than anyone else.

“I think I went through that so I could do this,” Frasier said. “The more we talk about it, the more we break the stigma.”

ONE WAY of measuring the toll that construction work takes on the body is drug use in the trades. What starts as an opioid prescription for pain can quickly become a deadly addiction.

The building trades make up about 7% of the U.S. workforce but account for 16% of opioid overdoses, according to the nonprofit Center for Construction Research and Training.

Known as CPWR, the center also found that substance use in the construction trades is more likely to contribute to suicide than in other industries.

A potential game-changer is being studied in Canada, where Victoria Local 230 is working with the British Columbia and federal governments on a “green health” initiative to reduce opioid use among construction workers.

Together with the Vancouver Island Construction Unions, Local 230 secured public funds for a counseling program and then a dry needling clinic that first opened in the local’s hall. The process is an alternative form of pain management similar to acupuncture.

Local 230 also offers BuildStrong, a confidential app that serves as a welfare check for members who need help. An “alone timer” function alerts medics if a user is unresponsive.

“I think of Local 230 as a ‘cradle-to-grave local,’” Business Manager Phil Venoit said. “We can be like a big brother who’s looking after a member’s best interests.”

His local has taken on mental health and drug issues for years, from hosting Watson’s workshops to training members to administer naloxone, or Narcan, which can reverse overdoses if given quickly.

“To be Canadian is to be about caring,” Venoit said. “If there’s something we can do, a better way to help the membership, then that’s what we’ll do.”

AS LOCAL 230’s efforts demonstrate, fighting for public policies and funding is a vital part of mental health advocacy.

Where family and paid leave laws are present, CPWR found a lower suicide rate among construction workers, especially for women. For men, primarily, laws limiting opioid prescriptions also had a positive effect.

In Minnesota, a state with some of the nation’s strongest workers’ rights and safety laws, the Legislature in May was considering an IBEW-supported bill that would invest $1 million in mental health resources for construction workers, including peer support initiatives, training and outreach.

Industry leaders also are taking the issue seriously, funding research, publishing articles, maintaining resource-rich websites and, since 2020, sponsoring Construction Suicide Prevention Week every September.

Construction CEOs, NABTU and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention also have formed an advisory council to discuss strategies and goals for improving mental health.

“The high rate of suicide in the construction community demands that we find new and better solutions that prioritize mental health as much as we do physical safety,” Bechtel Chairman and CEO Brendan Bechtel said at the council’s first meeting in March.

As NABTU President Sean McGarvey put it: “The well-being of our workforce is at the core of everything NABTU does. Addressing the crisis requires taking critical steps together as an industry to ensure that every worker has access to the resources, education and support they need.”

Union and industry leaders stress that focusing on mental health is essential not only for affected members but for everyone’s safety on a worksite. For electricians, who strive for perfection under pressure, the risks are especially steep. A mistake can cause devastating injuries, if not death.

“We have a high expectation of excellence,” said Tarn Goelling, an international representative in the Safety Department. “It’s something to be proud of. At the same time, it’s part of why we have to be aware of the effects on mental health.”

ACCIDENTS themselves are a threat to mental health. Whether jobsite tragedies, natural disasters or first-responder calls for linemen when power lines trap people inside crashed cars, such events commonly trigger post-traumatic stress.

For Local 47 member Hugh Chandler, 33, the trauma was fatal.

A lineman’s rodeo champion, a happy and proud IBEW brother, and a man described as an “idol” to others for his kindness and desire to help solve people’s problems, Chandler was also an addict.

He’d struggled with drugs even before age 14, when he came to live with his sister and her husband, Local 47 journeyman Dean Owens. Several rounds of rehab and his family’s love and support helped him improve at times.

But the near-deadly electrocution of a close friend and IBEW brother sent Chandler spiraling downhill.

A shock sent the man slumping to the floor of a bucket truck opposite Chandler’s while on a transmission line crew that also included Owens. He recalls the scene in harrowing detail: the initial horror, Chandler cautiously lifting their brother out of the bucket and the two of them performing CPR. Together with their crewmates, they saved the man’s life, though the injuries ended his career.

“That incident kicked Hugh down into an entirely different hole,” Owens said. “It just consumed him. He distanced himself from us. I think he went straight back to addiction, rather than dealing with the reality of what we went through.”

Days after Christmas 2024, Chandler was found dead in his RV. Owens believes he unwittingly took opioids laced with something stronger.

“He was my best friend and my brother,” he said. “For me, it’s just a black hole. I’m always missing the passenger in my truck. I’m missing my work partner. I’m missing my buddy.”

He said Chandler was a master at concealing his drug use and his work was impeccable. Had someone on the job noticed and reached out to him, “he probably would have denied it.”

But Owens urges people to try.

“Dig deeper. Get closer. Find a way to make your time available,” Owens said. “Do the dinners, check up on them at home, pick them up in the mornings. Just be there, be present.”

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, a traditionally “tough guy” culture is one of the trades’ major hurdles to dealing more openly with mental health and drug use.

“We work in an industry with a ‘Suck it up, princess’ mentality,” said Watson. “A lot of men take pride in being able to work through pain. And if you want to retire, you can’t miss work.”

Treating mental health as a safety issue may be one way to break through, said Mark MacNichol.

The subject was a recurring theme at the IBEW Safety Conference in March, where MacNichol found participants eager to learn and share.

Natalie Anaya was one of them. A Los Angeles Local 11 member, she joined the local’s Safety Committee after hearing mental health discussed at a tradeswomen’s conference.

“I didn’t know that mental health was under the same safety umbrella,” said Anaya, an inside wirewoman. “It definitely needs to be talked about a lot more.”

Members and experts alike say the trades’ growing diversity — a point of pride for the IBEW — requires different approaches to mental health. Watson has found, for example, that both men and women are less likely to share their feelings in a mixed-gender group.

For people of color, a history of racism in medicine can be a roadblock to seeing a therapist and contribute to a culture of silence. For military veterans, trauma can be a major factor; more than 6,000 die by suicide every year in the United States.

Watson said affinity groups can be ideal places for people to open up and feel like they’re being heard, noting the IBEW Strong initiative and the thriving women’s, equity and diversity, and veterans committees.

“There’s nothing wrong with focusing mental health awareness among groups,” he said. “That’s often where it starts.”

AS LOCALS tackle mental health, there’s ample opportunity to learn from each other.

Riverside, Calif., Local 440, for instance, runs a support group via Zoom where members can talk about whatever is on their mind. A dedicated Facebook page makes it easy to communicate between meetings and draw in others who need help.

“It’s a way for us to be there for each other,” said Bernie Balland, assistant business manager and organizer. “It’s important to know that it’s OK to not be OK, and that there are people who will go out of their way to help you if you ask.”

Meanwhile, locals are promoting EAPs through posters, cards, coins, helmet stickers, websites and social media. Oklahoma City Local 1141 features its EAP on its homepage, along with the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline that provides free help 24/7 in the U.S. and Canada.

“We want to plant that seed. If a member needs help or knows of someone in need, hopefully they’ll remember that information,” Local 1141 Business Manager Dewayne Wilcox said.

As a union founded on the importance of safety and one steeped in solidarity and the ethos of having each other’s backs, Watson said, the IBEW is uniquely positioned to address the mental health crisis.

“Organized labor is an agent of change. There wouldn’t be workplace safety without us,” he said. “This is just another issue we need to take on.”

CURRENTLY, the IBEW is setting up a mental health advocacy program through the Family Medical Care Plan, which has long provided mental health benefits. Recently, the plan added Talk Space, a telemedicine service for members who aren’t ready or able to see a therapist in person.

“There’s a lot of stigma around mental health, and some people don’t want to be seen walking into a counselor’s office,” said Darrin Golden, FMCP executive director.

He, Cooper and International Secretary-Treasurer Paul Noble emphasized their concern for members’ mental well-being in the May episode of the new IBEW podcast, “The Line — Leadership to Membership.”

“Mental health is just as important as physical health,” Cooper said. “I think it’s more and more in people’s minds and their hearts than it’s ever been.”