In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Sonya Bohmann, Executive Director of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention (CIASP), an organization that has quietly become one of the most effective workplace mental health movements in the country. The opening framing of this episode is one I stand behind completely: construction, not tech, not healthcare, not corporate America, has led the way on workplace mental health. It has done something different, making mental health culturally relevant, tackling the hard stuff head-on, and figuring out how to scale it in ways that other industries have not yet managed.
Sonya came into this role through a remarkable convergence of lived experience and professional calling. A sibling loss survivor who spent over a decade in construction leadership, she encountered the CIASP job posting twice in the same LinkedIn session and took it as a sign from the universe. Three years into what she describes as her dream job, she has transformed CIASP from a promising initiative into a model that other high-risk industries, oil and gas, manufacturing, mining, healthcare, and the service sector, are now looking to replicate.
The episode delivers two immediately actionable takeaways for any organization looking to move beyond the performative wellness calendar and build something real: how to shift from awareness to genuine action at the individual, team, organizational, and industry level; and how to make mental health a 12-month-a-year conversation that doesn't rely on awareness month campaigns or crisis data alone. Sonya also shares the single simplest action anyone can take today to signal allyship and connect colleagues to help, an idea so low-barrier and high-impact it landed as the episode's mic-drop moment.
Why This Matters in the Workplace
The State Trooper Effect Is Real
Every organization has experienced it: a Mental Health Month campaign goes live, people engage, and then the moment it ends, everything goes back to exactly the way it was before. Sonya calls this the state trooper effect. You slow down when you see the squad car in your rear-view mirror, and the second it disappears, you accelerate again. One-off awareness campaigns, wellness weeks, and annual trainings create this effect reliably. The organizations that are actually moving the needle have figured out how to make mental health a core value, not a priority, and the distinction between those two things is the crux of this episode.
Core Value vs. Priority: A Critical Distinction
CIASP board member Joe Xavier's line is worth repeating: mental health cannot be a priority. It must be a core value. A priority is connected to revenue generation. It is time-sensitive. It changes with the wind. A core value is who you are. It is what you believe in. It is what the organization stands for regardless of the quarter, the contract, or the market. Every construction company already claims safety as a core value. Sonya's argument, and mine, is that psychological safety cannot be separated from physical safety. The conversation has to happen as often and as seriously as the toolbox talk about fall hazards.
The Data Entry Point That Actually Works
Most industries start their mental health communication with the hardest data: 15 workers a day die by suicide in construction. We are losing people. While urgency matters and the data is real and important, leading exclusively with crisis data creates a predictable response: fear, hopelessness, and an instinct in some audiences to question whether the industry is worth recommending to their children. Sonya's approach, and the one I endorse fully, is to go to where people are already saying yes. Sleep deprivation. Stress. Burnout. Worrying about their kids. These are the softer entry points that build the relationship with the audience before the harder conversations begin. Once that relationship exists, the crisis data lands differently.
What Makes the CIASP Model Replicable
• The STAND pledge framework (Safety, Training, Awareness, Normalize, Decrease) provides a simple, sequential structure that any organization can follow without feeling overwhelmed
• Toolbox talks built around the STAND framework are transferable to any industry, not just construction
• A needs analysis tool allows companies to identify what they have in place and where the gaps are, then access resources to fill them systematically
• Content is designed in multiple formats and lengths, 20-minute podcasts, short social posts, monthly webinars, to meet people where they are
• A 12-month calendar approach ties mental health messaging to existing cultural moments (National Hydration Day, Valentine's Day, pet days, walk days) rather than relying entirely on awareness months
• Story-sharing, love letters, recovery stories, I-helped-a-friend moments, is deliberately built in, with guidelines for safe messaging to ensure stories inspire rather than harm
In this episode, we’ll answer:
Why is the construction industry leading the way on workplace mental health?
What is the difference between a mental health priority and a mental health core value at work?
What is the STAND pledge and how does it help organizations build mental health programs?
What is the state trooper effect in workplace wellness and how do you avoid it?
Why is sharing crisis data alone not an effective mental health communication strategy?
Two Tactical Takeaways from This Episode
Tactical Takeaway #1: Make the Shift From Awareness to Action
Sonya's first takeaway is a challenge to the dominant mode of workplace mental health engagement: awareness. Awareness is necessary but not sufficient. There is always someone new entering the conversation who needs to learn the basics, and the 988 number, and the language of mental health. But awareness alone does not save lives. What saves lives is training the helpers, equipping people to recognize when someone around them is struggling, ask if they need help, and connect them to support.
The practical implication is that action has to happen at every level simultaneously. At the individual level, it looks like adding 988 to your email signature today (more on this below). At the team level, it looks like toolbox talks and the STAND framework. At the organizational level, it looks like baking mental health into onboarding, benefit renewal, leadership development, retirement transitions, and exit interviews. At the industry level, it looks like showing up constantly, at conferences, in trade publications, in comment sections, in letters to editors, not as a one-time campaign but as a sustained and visible presence.
WHY IT WORKS
The shift from awareness to action works because it gives people something to do, and doing something changes the internal narrative from "this is someone else's problem" to "I am part of the solution." The CIASP STAND framework specifically addresses the overwhelm problem: instead of presenting mental health as a massive, daunting agenda, it breaks the work into discrete, manageable actions that a company can move through at its own pace. That design decision, simplifying so it is scalable and replicable, is one of the primary reasons the model has spread the way it has.
Tactical Takeaway #2: Make Mental Health a 12-Month-a-Year Conversation, and Change Your Email Signature Today
Sonya's second takeaway operates at two levels: the strategic and the immediate. Strategically, the argument is that mental health cannot be a Wellness Wednesday or a Mental Health Month campaign. The state trooper effect guarantees that the moment the campaign ends, behavior reverts. Making mental health a 12-month-a-year conversation requires a calendar infrastructure, a variety of messaging approaches, and a deliberate decision to tie mental health to existing organizational touchpoints rather than creating something separate.
The immediate application is Sonya's mic-drop suggestion: change your email signature today. Add a single line, "If you or someone you care about is in crisis, contact 988", to every email you send. That one line costs nothing, takes 30 seconds, and immediately signals to everyone you communicate with that you are an ally, that mental health matters here, and that help is available. It levels the playing field instantly and requires no committee, no budget, and no approval process.
WHY IT WORKS
The 12-month approach works because it treats mental health the way effective safety cultures treat physical safety: as something that is present in every conversation, every meeting, every onboarding, every renewal cycle. The email signature works because it is frictionless. There is no barrier between the decision and the action. And frictionless actions are the ones that actually get done. Sonya's point about the state trooper effect applies in reverse here too: every time someone receives your email and sees that line, the message reinforces. Day after day, interaction after interaction, the norm shifts.
ABOUT sonya bohmann
Sonya Bohmann is the Executive Director for the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention a 501 c (3) that was started in 2018. Our mission is to provide and disseminate information and resources for suicide prevention and mental health promotion in construction with the goal of creating a zero-suicide industry.
Sonya comes from a reconstruction background having spent over a decade in the commercial remodel and refresh and facilities maintenance space. Giving her the unique understanding of how the industry works as well as the mental health challenges faced daily by construction workers. This experience has given her insight into how companies both large and small are tackling this worker crisis and what work still needs to be done.