April 28 is the National Day of Mourning, a day to honour workers killed, injured or suffered illness from their work. This year in Sudbury, the main theme is psychological health and safety in the workplace. Third-generation miner Mickey O’Brien shared his story of recovering from 10 years of substance abuse, alcoholism and drug addiction. O’Brien is now six years sober and was a guest speaker at the Day of the Mourning ceremony. “We need more resources for people. People are waiting over four months – sometimes, over a year to see a psychiatrist,” he said. “When someone finally does make the commitment to get into treatment, sometimes they are not in there for six months a year. I am sure a lot of people pass away during that time.” Unions are highlighting psychosocial health and safety as a critical workplace issue. “We represent paramedics. We represent nursing professions. We represent educational assistants. All of these professions highly subjected to workplace violence. Highly subjected to trauma. Highly subjected to the kinds of disabilities that it them off for years,” said Andréanne Chénier, a national health and safety representative for Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). “How do we make out workplaces safer so that we are not seeing those injuries. Those mental health injuries happening and it’s happening every second, it’s happening in private, it’s happening in public, it’s happening in trades and it’s an issue that is becoming epidemic in nature,” said Ontario Federation of Labour president Laura Walton. O’Brien is a union rep and told CTV News that he wants people to mean it when they ask someone if they are okay. “Say if someone is acting out of character, something like that, you never know what someone has going on at home,” he said. “I have seen people spiral out of control at work when we could of helped them to the point where they were fired. Seeing guys end up homeless, lose their houses, lose their wives fall into drug addiction and alcoholism, you know. Some of them ended up in jail, some of them passed away,” said O’Brien. O’Brien said when it comes to psychological health and safety in the workplace we need to do better, we can do better and it starts with a collective commitment.
