I was in a mine site office three years ago when a shift supervisor pulled me aside. He said, “We’ve done everything right. Safety protocols are solid. Incident rates are down. But I’m losing people for reasons that don’t show up on an incident report.”
Research confirms that acute psychosocial stress impairs verbal recall, attention, and working memory, with prolonged abnormalities persisting after the stressor. For any operation that depends on checklists, handovers, inspections, or safety-critical decisions, that is not a human resources issue. That is an operational risk.
Our Default mechanism is the operating system you didn’t choose, but you’re still running in the background.
Workplace harassment and violence do not erupt out of nowhere. They escalate, accumulate, and grow inside environments where silence is normalized, reporting is distrusted, fear is familiar, and disrespect is rationalized as “just the culture.”
We experience culture through behavior. We feel it in the tone of an email, the silence in a meeting, the look exchanged after someone speaks up.
Mental Health Month is over, the hashtags will fade, the campaigns will slow down, but the suffering will not. Across the globe, human beings, people that you and I know, or even ourselves, will wake up tomorrow in a state of emotional and cognitive exhaustion, some in silence, others in survival.
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