While stressing that “it’s never one cause” when it comes to mental illness and suicide, Margo Lydon, CEO of nationwide health promotion SuperFriend, told ICN sister publication Energy News that work environments far removed from support structures such as family are among several risk factors that contribute to mental health issues and suicide.

The comments came just before the Minerals Council of Australia launched its own blueprint to address mental health and wellbeing issues in the workforce this week.

“Despite the growing awareness of the importance of mental health, there is still much to do,” said the MCA, which also hosted a CEO Health and Safety Forum hosted in Melbourne yesterday.

Suicide is the leading cause of death for men under the age of 44 in Australia – a situation not helped, Lydon said, by the gulf that exists in funding from both industry and government between suicide risk mitigation and prevention programs and road safety.

The prominence of youth suicide in the media has engendered a special focus of various governments, which has led to those figures “stabilising”, for want of a better term, but the “middle years” of the 40-55 age group are now vulnerable, she said.

“Certainly within Australia we are noticing that the suicide rates have gone up according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ recent results – which are a couple of years old – indicating a slight increase,” Lydon said.

“It’s particularly worrying around the middle years – those highly productive years from a worker perspective is the area where we’re seeing an increase in the rates of suicide.”

Men’s issues

Part of the problem, she said, was that “in any male-dominated sector we know that men, as a generalisation, are not particularly great at recognising the early warning signs and seeking help if they’re experiencing poor mental health or mental health issues”

“The other [contributing factors] are what’s happening in the energy industry at the moment,” she said. “There are significant pressures within the industry – redundancies in some organisations; they have challenges with fly-in, fly-out workers; with drug and alcohol possibly being an issue within a lot of worksites,” she said.

“They also have a lot of issues with workers being very isolated, and we know from a mental health perspective that one of the best things people can do to strengthen their mental health is to be really well connected.

“When you have an isolated working environment, be that geographically or just not being in contact with others socially, those are risk factors.

“Employers we are talking to are considering how they can minimise those risk factors to keep their people productive and at work, because when they are, it’s the best outcome for everybody.

“Some of those risk factors will never be able to be completely mitigated because of geography or the male-dominated nature of the work environments and industry, but [companies] are considering what both employers and employees – because it’s a joint responsibility – can be doing to help mental health and reduce the risk of suicide or mental illness.”

She said another problem was that Australia suffers from a distinct lack of appropriate funding to address such a significant societal issue.

“We lose about twice the number of people to suicides than on our national roads every year, and when you step back and look at the dollar funding for road safety campaigns which has been nationally and locally driven versus the dollar funding for suicide prevention and programs, there’s a significant difference,” Lydon said.

Lydon, who has spent 15 years in the mental health sector, is a firm believer that mental health is everybody’s business.

“One in two Australians aged between 16 and 85 will experience a mental illness at some point in their lifetime, and therefore it’s likely to be your sister, brother, colleague or child that is affected,” she said.

“The fact that we lose over 2500 Australians every year to suicide is also likely to lead to the majority of people at some point knowing somebody who has either been grieved by suicide or has taken their life.

“This means it’s really important that employers recognise that they do not need to have clinical people on staff to make a difference in this space. There’s an enormous amount of things any person can do to help mitigate and minimise the unnecessary sufferings from mental illness and suicide.

“That’s about having a health workplace that fosters the opportunities for people to thrive, not only professionally but personally and leads to increased productivity and profitability.”

She said that while there was “absolutely a role” for clinicians and clinical staff, particularly in the treatment and intervention space, there was also an “enormous role” lay people with some education and good resources, supports and tools around them can play in and have engaging conversations.

Yesterday's national “R U OK?” conversation campaign is a perfect example of everybody, with a little bit of education, being able to check in with those they care about and ask if they are okay, Lydon said.

“If they answer ‘no’, what can they do and how they follow up is really important, getting them to the right help, staying connected and engaged and giving them that sense of belonging,” she said.