Sydney mother advocates for mental health support after son's suicide in trades industry

Sydney mother Maggie Pearce says her son Ben was loud, had a lot of friends and was dedicated to his job as a shopfitter.

"He was just a beautiful soul," Ms Pearce said.

She says her 21-year-old son, who took his own life in 2018, had struggled with drinking.

Maggie wanted to turn that grief into fuel for change and started facilitating conversations about mental health in her transport workplace where she looks after a depot of staff.

She now volunteers as a connector with MATES, which specialises in heavy industries including construction, mining, energy and manufacturing.

Ms Pearce says she has had hundreds of important conversations with her workmates since, including when someone has had a bad day or when a major event is affecting staff broadly.

"I don't want to see another mother in the same position that I am," she said.

"I think the only way that we can do this is to increase awareness for people to say that it's OK to reach out for help.

Trades are the most common occupation among male suicides

Deaths by suicide among men are highly represented in heavy industry.

In 2023 and 2024, 1,383 men died by suicide who worked as technicians or in trades, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

This figure represented the most common occupation among suicides, making up 27.6 per cent of suicides in males.

Ms Pearce says the long hours and living away from loved ones may be leading to some mental stresses to those in this line of work.

She also says some occupations like mining and construction on big sites are reasonably well paid, which is sometimes fed into gambling.

"They're working long hours, so then their, I would call it 'playtime', is probably not the best things," Ms Pearce said.

MATES in Construction NSW CEO Brad Parker says there's many other factors too, including the long working hours and culture of heavy alcohol use and occasionally bullying.

"One of the big things is job insecurity in our industry," Mr Parker said.

"It is the only industry that I know of in the world where we work so hard to work ourselves out of a job."

Network of carers looking out for workmates

The charity was initially set up in 2007 in Queensland as Men Actively Talking to Each other on Sites (MATES) in response to research showing higher rates of suicide among construction workers compared to other professions.

Mr Parker says MATES has since grown to around 37,000 volunteers nationally reaching around 330,000 colleagues to have potentially life-saving conversations.

In 2021 the World Health Organization recognised their work as an example in their implementation guide for suicide prevention in other countries.

Mr Parker said the key is having a network of people on the ground at workplaces where they are accessible for the important conversations.

"We need our people on the ground."

The NSW organisation is mostly funded by government, while its national arm received around 43 per cent of its funding from government sources.

Ms Pearce says while attitudes towards mental health have become more open in the last decade, there's still work to be done to make it more accessible.

Ms Pearce hopes governments can help fund programs to set up similar support networks in small businesses, like where her son Ben worked, which was too small to have the kind of support networks that larger sites have.

"I don't believe they have the resources or funding within the smaller companies," Ms Pearce said.

"That will help break down some stigma around mental health."