To close out this year’s Construction Suicide Prevention Week – a conversation worth returning to.

“They called me the suicide guy.”

We were in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year recording episode 19 of the Skilled AF podcast with Josh Vitale, Co-founder & CEO of Project BUILT, and Angelo Suntres, Founder of Human Side of Construction.

I couldn’t believe what Josh Vitale was recounting. Two dozen suicide interventions he had personally conducted as a superintendent during a massive semiconductor project in Chandler, Arizona. Yes, the same one that got tons of fanfare when former President Biden visited.

8,000 people on site.
45-50 million man hours.
A ton of people in crisis.

“Dubious as it may be, they called me the suicide guy because I had built a community center on that job site,” shares Vitale.

In one of his interventions, an ironworker was on the brink. An ex-Army veteran who served in one of the toughest units in Afghanistan had just gotten news that he had lost the 22nd person from his unit to suicide. His brother was a foreman on the job and called Vitale. “Can you meet with my brother down at the trailer? He’s really struggling.” It was in that moment that Josh knew he was the guy for this job. “If not you, then who? If not now, then when?”

As a Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) survivor, Vitale lived with suicidal ideation for 20 years. Raised by an abusive stepfather, he carried that pain throughout most of his adult life. It’s taken him years to heal and be able to speak openly about what he experienced – years he credits to his wife Amy, getting sober, and a mindfulness practice. Because of his lived experience, he felt uniquely positioned to be able to help others in the industry.

As Josh shares in this episode, he’d be in these situations trying to figure out what was missing between these men and them getting the help that they needed.

That gap is where Project BUILT was born.

Josh will tell you the industry is still stuck in the wrong gear. “We’re in the awareness phase, but we’re not in the action phase. And I’m a builder – I wanted to be in the action phase.” So he and his wife, Amy, started digging into what’s actually breaking these men.

A pattern appeared.

“Everyone I ever did an intervention with and all of the superintendents and workers that I talked to, they say the same thing. I’ve been divorced two times. My kids don’t speak to me. I’ve sacrificed my entire life for a family that doesn’t appreciate it.”

Lack of hope. Loss of connection. Family.

It was the same thing Josh and Amy were struggling with themselves – the migratory nature of the work, the isolation, reintegrating into the family when you’re home, creating a healthy environment even though you’re on the road. “If you can find a way to heal the family, it is the black swan,” shares Vitale.

Modeled in part on Project Sanctuary, which has run retreats for more than 10,000 military families over 15 years, the approach is to treat the household as the unit worth saving, because a person with somewhere to belong has a reason to climb out of the hole.

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Content warning: This episode discusses suicide, substance use, addiction, and workplace mental health crises.

If you or someone you know is in immediate danger or experiencing a mental health crisis, please take one of the following actions:

• Call 911 (or your local emergency number)

• Call or text 988 – the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the U.S. available 24/7

I wasn’t necessarily close with my uncle growing up. He was six years older than my mom and built a life in Colorado while we stayed in California. But it was still heartbreaking. Especially since my Aunt Gemma, his wife of 30 years, had died by suicide exactly one year and one month before I received that call. Two suicides in just over a year for our family.

The news of Aunt Gemma the year before was a shock. No one in our family knew she was struggling. And I can’t help but think that if she had lived, my uncle would’ve been around longer, and might still be here today. But that’s all wishful thinking. My only hope now is that they both are resting easy.

There was a moment last year around this time where I kept feeling this pull to cover the human costs impacting the trades. The reality that we’re losing people year after year to suicide in construction at truly alarming rates – 4 times higher compared to the general population (osha.gov). A glaring signal that something is deeply wrong with how we’re currently operating.

On World Suicide Prevention Day last year, I spent its entirety deep in thought – researching papers, watching videos, gathering what information and articles I could find. How do we fix this? If I’m advocating for people to go into these careers, how the hell do we fix this?

That evening I took my daughter to the park. I couldn’t stop thinking about the research from the day. How did we get here? Why does it still persist? What conditions do we need to change so we have different outcomes? While at the park my daughter wanted to swing next to this young girl whose father had just placed her in a swing. I started up a conversation with the dad asking what the little girl’s name was. He said Gemma. It took my breath away. The only other person I knew named Gemma was my aunt. Given where I spent much of that day, it felt like a little nudge to keep going.

It sent me down a path looking for answers and towards the people unafraid to share their truths, experiences, and what they are doing at ground level to change the human outcomes for current workers, their families, and ultimately this next generation. It led to:

• Angelo Suntres and his platform Human Side of Construction, who’s bringing these conversations to the forefront with a mission to improve the human experience within the industry

• Josh & Amy Vitale running Project BUILT who are taking a wholistic approach to suicide prevention by starting with the family unit

• Cal Beyer at SAFE Project (Stop the Addiction Fatality Epidemic), a 30+ year construction veteran and one of the earliest architects of construction’s mental health movement in the U.S.

• Stephanie Lemek and her company, The Wounded Workforce, who’s reshaping how we approach mental health, trauma, and resilience at work

• John Burcaw with the Finishing Trades Institute of the Upper Midwest, who’s arguably leading one of the best apprenticeship programs with wraparound mental health support in the U.S.

• Angela Hucker, founder and CEO of EPIC a social enterprise in Australia, advocating for leadership, psychosocial safety and construction workplace reform

• Trevor Botkin, a Red Seal Carpenter building Canada’s first workplace adjacent and worker-led mental health and recovery network for skilled and industrial trades called MusterPoint

These are people who turned their own pain into purpose – who are building the support workers need, so that no one has to carry this alone.

If you’re struggling – or you’re worried about someone who is – you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time.

“When you have a past, you have to rise above it. The expectation is higher for us. And it’s an unfortunate situation, but that’s the way it is.”

Brad Henderson — who has quickly become a sought-after expert in right-sizing the operational ship across different trades companies while building a second-chance pipeline — said that to me in episode 22 of the Skilled AF podcast.

He’s someone who got caught up in the opioid epidemic after a baseball injury, battled addiction for years and found himself in a prison cell. The HVAC trades became a landing ground to rebuild his life after leaving prison only a short five years ago.

This statement was something I had personally never thought about before. How someone who has a record, done the wrong thing in the past, has more to prove to society. The expectations are higher and seemingly stacked against them.

There’s a sense of trust that needs to be built back up. Established. Gained. Earned. Trust with an employer, their colleagues, their families and friends. But most importantly, trust and belief in themselves. That their past doesn’t define their future. That they can truly see something through. That they can change. They can provide. That they are worthy of a beautiful life.

And when that happens, when that person is given an opportunity and they can see, albeit it can be slow, these actions stack up, confidence comes back, trust and belief in oneself comes back, and that’s when everything changes. Their circumstances no longer define them, they define their circumstances.

But you can’t do this in isolation. It would be like throwing someone into the deep end who doesn’t know how to swim, and doesn’t have a life raft.

Roughly 37% of people released from state prison are arrested again within that first year.
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2021

Brad and I talk about this at length in the interview — how that first year out of prison is make or break. It’s the single highest-risk stretch of the whole journey, steeper than any year that follows because the actions that first year compound. And the water is roughest right when someone has the least structure in their life. No steady paycheck yet, stable housing is questionable, and there’s no proof that they will succeed.

So Brad took it upon himself to build his own life raft, because “the system is not going to change for Brad Henderson.” He surrounded himself with the right people. With people who he only dreamt of being connected with. They became his mentors. His team. A group of people holding him accountable with no judgement attached. People who saw Brad for who he was — a good person, a smart person, a father trying to leave a better legacy for his daughter, a husband trying to show up for his wife, and someone taking total ownership for his past. They never let him lose sight of where he was headed when the hard days crashed down. And oh they crashed down. The work isn’t easy. These are physically demanding, high stress jobs and he was coming in at the lowest rung of the totem pole.

But here he is, out on the other side, on a mission to share his life raft with people who’ve been in his shoes. Individuals hungry for a second chance. Who just need support on their journey to swimming on their own.

Watch the full episode here.

Listen to the full episode here.

And I mean, when you think shortage, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? We’re short something. We don’t have enough of something. So we just need more people became the rational explanation.

But as I kept preaching that we need more people, I kept having these deja vu conversations. People in the field saying, “That’s great and all, but tell me how you’re going to keep people?” People on social media reaching out saying they couldn’t find an apprenticeship, or they’d been on years-long union waitlists, or people in residential construction saying no one would hire them without “3-5 years experience.” A few women I interviewed described being harassed out of the industry.

And then one morning in the fall of 2025, I was dropping my daughter off at school and thought I saw Big Nate behind the wheel of a truck at a stop sign. How could that be? Nathan Shannon, my dear friend, my high school prom date, had died by overdose in 2020 right after passing his Journeyman’s Millwright exam in San Diego, California.

It had me sitting there wiggling, knowing deep down that something was off. What this AI boom is quickly exposing, which in my body I was feeling, is that recruiting more people into these careers isn’t going to solve the shortage.

Because the “shortage” is not the problem. The shortage is a symptom.

The Demand

I was impacted by the “shortage” when I was previously running a company in the clean energy space. I couldn’t comprehend how we were pushing these energy solutions yet, we didn’t have the skilled workforce developed to actually execute on any of these promises. Compound that with a housing crisis, the fact that the U.S. went about four decades of underinvestment in our infrastructure and it’s all coming due to upgrade, a massive chunk of people are retiring over the next few years, and now enter…the AI race. More than 40% of a nearly $7 trillion global data center build-out is expected to land in the U.S. by 2030 (McKinsey).

Developing this workforce feels like the single biggest hurdle in realizing our future, while simultaneously changing the trajectory of a lot of people’s lives. But here’s where the shortage framing has become quite frankly, problematic. It has collapsed supply and demand into one frame: not enough workers. Which makes the solution sound simple. More people. And it’s sending every state, every foundation, every Fortune 500 Company chasing the same answer. Pour money into recruitment and training.

Last month, The New York Times reported that blue-collar work has plateaued. Manufacturing and construction lost 150,000 jobs over the past year. Hiring is at 2009 recession levels. Economists in the piece called it cyclical – Tariffs, immigration, interest rates, frozen housing. But buried at the end of the same article was this: “In the areas where data centers are being built, they literally can’t find bodies fast enough.” I’ve spoken with enough people constructing data centers to know that this is in fact true.

It seems we’ve built a system that makes us unable to move people to where the work is, in any direction, at any given time. That’s not a cycle. And that’s not a shortage. That’s one dysfunctional system.

A Leaky Bucket and an Even Leakier Pipeline

I’ve spoken with hundreds of tradespeople and construction workers over the last few years, and the data and the stories point to the same conclusion: we are bringing people into the trades, but we’re losing them at every stage. And in many cases, access and mobility is constrained.

My best analogy is that the skilled trades and construction workforce resembles a leaky bucket with an even leakier pipeline – poorly designed and clogged in critical places.

Here are a few of the realities:

• In many regions across the U.S., union apprenticeships are full and some have waitlists in the thousands

• Apprenticeship program dropout rates run between 40% and 65%, depending on which study you read. Even the low end is staggering.

• Construction workers are 5x more likely to die by suicide than a jobsite accident, and the industry as a whole lost about 16,000 people in 2024 to death by suicide and overdose combined.

  

• Over 40% of tradeswomen have seriously considered leaving the industry due to discrimination, harassment, and lack of respect, according to one of the largest national surveys conducted on tradeswomen by IWPR in 2021. And in November 2025, a 20-year old female welder – Amber Czech - was murdered in Minnesota by her male coworker. It has caused a deluge of outrage by tradeswomen online reciting work experiences that mirrors the “Me Too” movement.

None of this looks like a shortage. So why do we keep calling it one?

The Reframe

Because focusing on the shortage as the problem lets every actor in the system off the hook. It obscures the dysfunction and shifts the blame to the worker who left versus the system at play. It deflects the need to have to change.

A former Independent Electrical Contractor (IEC) educator in the midwest told me recently: “I never liked the fact that we would brag about how many people we had enrolled, but we didn’t do a good job of keeping them. That bothered me to my core.”

She gave me her list of why her apprentices dropped out. The majority of the reasons were a condition: lack of mentorship, poor onboarding, toxic field culture, mismatch of job expectations, life circumstances with no support system around them, information they should have had upfront and didn’t.

Unfortunately, underneath this shortage narrative is an enormous amount of waste hiding in plain sight. Of dollars. Of potential. Of lives lost.

As Josh Vitale, a Senior Superintendant and Co-founder of Project BUILT – a nonprofit focused on addressing the suicide and overdose epidemic in the trades – put it: “We’ve been building for extraction, not for longevity.”

Until we reframe that the shortage is a symptom of a bigger systems problem, we’ll keep pouring more water into the top of this bucket wishing, hoping, waiting, to get different results.

Now What?

Getting more people exposed to these careers matters. It’s some of the work I’m involved in. But you can’t recruit your way out of a system that loses people at every stage.

The beauty of reframing the problem though, is that the underlying questions start to change. Who built this and why? Who benefits from it staying the way it is? What would it take to design something that actually works for the people doing the job? And underneath all of them: what are the financial implications? The real needle mover.

If half of apprentices never finish, what is that costing?

If workers leave because of preventable culture and leadership failures, what does that cost?

If taxpayer dollars fund workforce initiatives that fail to keep people in the industry, what are we actually funding?

Over the coming weeks I’ll be answering those questions, sharing what’s failing across the system, and connecting it to potential solutions.

Because the people building America deserve better.

RIP Big Nate.