Mental health and safety: Keeping the conversation going

By Emma Peterson. 

NRCA’s Cheryl Ambrose explains why starting and sustaining conversations about suicide and mental health is a critical safety issue for the industry. 

Around a year ago, the National Roofing Contractors Association (NRCA) launched its mental health webpage! This was a part of its larger initiative to start and sustain the conversation about mental health in the roofing and construction industries. Today, we want to make sure that conversation continues at every office and job site around the world. To talk about how we do that, Cheryl Ambrose, the NRCA’s vice president of enterprise risk management, came by for an episode of Roofing Road Trips®.  

In the roofing and construction worlds, mental health is often not talked about. But it is actually a huge safety concern and issue in the industry. Cheryl explained, “If you look at OSHA’s numbers for the average workplace deaths per year, the construction industry averages about a thousand a year. In comparison, death by suicide alone, not even talking substance use disorder or anything else, is five to six times that every year.” 

What can we do about this? Cheryl’s answer is simple: “Let's start the conversation and then keep the conversation going. We’re not mental health professionals, but we know that ignoring it, which we have been unconsciously doing, is not working. So let’s talk about it. And the research shows that talking does help. As a 2025 article from The European Journal of Psychiatry states, “Communit[ies] can contribute to suicide prevention by reducing the stigma surrounding mental illness and suicide through effective communication.” 

So, what does that effective communication look like on a job site? It can come in many different forms, it doesn’t even have to be a verbal conversation. Cheryl shared a story about an employee assistance program (EAP) that one of NRCA members put together to start the conversation. She explained, “One of our members, Kara McCaffrey with Houke Services, simply downloaded a poster from the NRCA. It’s fillable, so you put your EAP information on it and it also has the 988 number to call. The result of just putting some posters up? A fivefold per month increase in terms of the engagement with the EAP.” 

However the conversation looks at your workplace, whether it’s a mention in your morning toolbox talk or a poster in the office, having it is the first step towards protecting your crew and their mental health.  

Listen to the whole podcast to hear more of Cheryl’s insights! You can also visit NRCA’s mental health webpage for more resources.