Ask a crew how they handle an injury and most will tell you the same thing they learned growing up: walk it off and get back to work. That works poorly for a sprained ankle. It works far worse for anxiety, burnout, or trauma nobody has talked about in years.

In this episode of the Safety Spotlight Podcast, we sit down with Jason Ross, a health and safety manager at Bird Construction with roughly 25 years in the industry, to talk about the stigma that still surrounds men’s mental health in the trades and the message he most wants people to hear: “it’s okay to not be okay.”

Jason’s turning point came on a December highway in northern Manitoba, driving home in a snowstorm after three weeks on a fly-in rotation. Twenty minutes in, his heart was racing, he had tunnel vision, and he could not get words out. He thought it was a heart attack and handed the wheel to his director. It was a panic attack, the first time he had ever faced a mental health condition. Working with psychologists and a psychiatrist, he was diagnosed with complex PTSD and generalized anxiety disorder, rooted in something that happened in his twenties and had stayed bottled up ever since.

He now chairs the mental health employee resource group at Bird and spends a large share of his time in front of crews, telling that story.

Inside this episode:

• A panic attack behind the wheel, and why he was sure he would not make it home for Christmas
• How a blue-collar, sports-first upbringing taught him to bury what he was feeling
• The mix of counseling, breath work, cold therapy and other tools that help him manage day to day
• Why his early presentations full of slides and data fell flat, and what he does instead
• The two statistics he puts on screen to start a real conversation with a crew
• How Bird’s resource group got more than 150 employees trained in mental health first aid, with frontline foremen as a priority
• Where he wants the industry to go next, from better counseling benefits to faster, real-time support

Jason does not pretend he has it solved. He describes the work as daily, with good days and bad ones, and he shares how a near panic attack in a barber’s chair the day before our recording reminded him of that. What gets him through is a set of small, repeatable habits, like stepping outside a few times a day for a one-minute breathing reset.

Standing up in front of 150 tradespeople still makes him nervous. What keeps him doing it is the handful of people who pull him aside afterward to thank him. His goal for every session is modest on purpose. “If I can connect with one, two, three people in that room, then I know that that conversation is going to continue.” He thinks showing up in jeans and a polo, tattoos visible, does a lot of the work. “It builds trust,” he says, and a little humor helps too. Fifteen years ago, he tells crews, he would have punched himself in the face for standing up and talking about his feelings.

You will also hear about the talk from former NHL goalie Corey Hirsch that gave Jason the push to share his own story, how he built the resource group with a small core team before taking it to senior leadership, and why he believes changing the industry will be “a generational process.”

If you supervise crews, run a safety program, or have watched someone on your site carry more than they let on, this one is worth the listen.

You can find Jason Ross on LinkedIn.