On a cold winter morning, construction workers up and down the UK put on their high vis and laid out hard hats to represent the thousands of colleagues who had lost their lives. They also put out signs that starkly read: ‘we apologise for any inconvenience during the suicide crisis’ and ‘STOP, suicide in construction’.
Desperate to raise awareness of a silent epidemic within the construction sector, their plan was to hit home just how many lives had been lost to suicide over the last decade. Kryss Tominay was very nearly one of them. ‘I’ve attempted suicide a few times,’ the stonemason tells Metro from his home in Yorkshire. ‘I felt everyone would be better off without me.
![[Why 7,000 construction workers failed to build ?the lost city?]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_233027406-3dcd.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
‘I’ve struggled with my mental health since I was about 18. I saw doctors, got put on medication, got taken off it, got put back on… I was going back and forth like that for years. Instead of breaking down and crying, I’d get angry and wanted to be left alone. I told myself I didn’t want to talk to people but deep down I really did. I wanted someone to ask “are you alright?”’.
![[Why 7,000 construction workers failed to build ?the lost city?]](https://metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/SEI_233027429-20a1-e1734377617956.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=646)
Things got so bad for Kryss that he thought about ending his life in 2018. ‘I ended up at a railway bridge. But then I saw the train lights and I just thought, “what am I doing?”” he remembers. Kryss, 37, runs Tominay Stone and first got into the profession when he was just 16. He knows all too well how difficult it is for men of all backgrounds to reach out for help with their mental health.
‘I’ve lost three friends to suicide,’ he says. ‘One, Duncan, was my best friend. It’s still a bit upsetting because nobody knew [how he was feeling.] The second, Luke, was a friend of my younger brother who I used to go to the gym with. Another lad called Jordan, he lived round here, died by suicide this year.
