Front Burner - Loneliness, suicide, substance abuse: Mental health in Alberta’s oilpatch

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Today on Front Burner, an intimate look at mental health struggles amongst workers in Alberta’s oilpatch with the co-producer of a new documentary on the subject, ‘Digging in the Dirt.’

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. So we've been hearing for a few years now that Alberta is hurting. Our report is warning that the province's oil patch, already hit hard by thousands of job losses, is on track to lose thousands more. The recession there was a big part of the provincial election in April. And the issue of pipelines and Alberta's economy continues to be

a factor in the federal campaign. But what sometimes gets lost in all of this is the human toll. In 2015, just at the height of the economic downturn, suicides in the province spiked by 30%. And that pain just doesn't go away. But a new CBC documentary shows that at least some of that pain, it was there before the economic downturn too. It's called Digging in the Dirt, and it looks at what mental health can be like for oil patch workers. Today, I'm joined by the documentary's co-producer, Omar Mualim. This is FrontBurner. Omar, hi.

Hi. I know when you started looking into the spike in suicides in Alberta, it was 2015. And what did you find? Berta, it was 2015. And what did you find? Well, I found anecdotally mental health professionals confirmed that they had been counseling or unfortunately responding to suicides at camps from more men who had been recently laid off or were underemployed and they were worried about how they're going to keep up with their finances. I mean, once you're making six figures for long enough, you get pretty used to a pretty comfortable life. But what I also found was that these professionals, these mental health professionals were telling me that this has been going on for

a long time, that there's been a mental health crisis in the workforce for a while. And maybe now it's exasperated because of underemployment. But before it was exasperated by, you know, grueling hours and long rotations, people being away from their families for three, four weeks at a time, and the lifestyle. You interview a number of people who work in and around the oil sands for this documentary. One of them is a crane operator named Chris Johnson. He describes his first experience going away to work in a work camp near Fort McMurray as totally overwhelming. The isolation, and it was December,

and it was cold like I had never felt in my life. And, you know, it was really my first time away. Tell me what these camps are like. There's a range. I've stayed in a camp for just three days just to do a little bit of my own research. And the camp that I went to, it was impressive in a lot of ways. I mean, one, the size of it was impressive. I grew up in a small town of about less than 3,000 people. This camp had 5,000 people. And I think for anyone from a small town to go into what kind of looks and feels a little bit vaguely like high school in the hallways and the lockers and the pattering of shoes.

But it's more people than you've ever really encountered at once. They're almost all men. And a lot of them are older than you and bigger than you. And now I'm really starting to see this through my own personal eyes. But you could imagine as a 19-year-old who's just come out of high school, maybe has an apprenticeship or is working toward an apprenticeship, what that would be like. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that it was overwhelming for you as well.

What kind of living quarters do they have? If you're lucky, you might get a 10 by 15 foot suite that has a bedroom to yourself. More often than not, there's sort of these Jack and Jill bathrooms. So it's a much smaller unit, and the bathroom is shared with the person on the other side of the hall. But then there's a lot of camps that are sort of at the, you know, these are the one-star camps, if you will. And it's like one bathroom to a wing and 20 people sharing that bathroom. Wow.

And, you know, and a very small space for them. Some camps are more siloed too. It's these individual trailers that are kind of spread out over the land and they're not necessarily connected. So if you want to go, you know, if you want to go to the cafeteria, you got to put on your boots and your jacket and you got to go outside into the cold. And whereas other ones feel vaguely like a mall food court and that it's just kind of down the hall. Other than go to the cafeteria and work in the oil fields, what is there to do on these camps?

and work in the oil fields, what is there to do on these camps? Some camps, not much else. There used to be bars in a lot of them, but most camps have gone dry. I think they learned pretty quickly that that was a problem. Some of them are pretty sophisticated in that they have, like, you know, billiards rooms and gaming lounges, and, you know, there's even one with a yoga studio. But there's not a lot of time. People think that, oh, you just work, like, an eight-hour, nine-hour shift shift and you come back. No. I mean, first of all, the shifts are really long. And second of all, you're just so wiped afterward that often you just want to get

back to your room and crash. And this is essentially this like fly in, fly out culture, right? Like guys will go for a couple of weeks, they'll work really, really hard, and then they'll go through that for two weeks, three weeks, it's natural to feel like on your four days off or one week off, you deserve to party. Right. You know, you deserve to play hard. Drinking. Drinking. Strip clubs. Strip clubs. Casinos? Drinking. Strip clubs? Strip clubs.

Casinos? Casinos. Vegas? I only ever went to Vegas twice, and I didn't spend a lot while I was there. I did one time because I got married there, but that's a different story. You know, back to Chris, the crane operator, for a second.

How did he respond to this new world he was in, working in the oil patch? Chris's experience, I think, is a very average one where, you know, he came in so young. There's kind of this culture of schoolyard bullying that he recounts being given noogies. And, you know, guys will play pranks on each other you know they'll grease someone's tools or something and if you know that person and you know and you're friendly with them it's easy to to see that as as a practical joke but a lot of times it's used to put people in their place and Chris recounts a lot of that kind of behavior and he himself he was you know he was kind of an emo punk kid going into the oil sands

and people looked at him like, who is this kid? Looking back in retrospect now, I definitely went down a very, very negative path to fit in and try and gain the acceptance of these people. At the time, I should have looked at, I should have taken more from the mental language that came on me at that point. So I think that that sort of set a tone for him on how he should be behaving. And as he became more of a senior in this workforce, he recounts now becoming the aggressor to younger workers who would come in. And so there was this culture of initiation that he continued as he became more more senior in his career. I definitely became a giant asshole and was just not a pleasant person to be around. I was surrounding myself with that negative energy and pushing away things that I had

had before that were positive. In this work hard, play hard mentality, did Chris take part in that? Oh, yeah. And I wonder how you can not when you're that young and you're making more money. My best year, I was probably 24 or 25. I made between $140,000 and $150,000. I had never seen anything like that in my life.

It was more money than I'd ever had in my bank account came from one week. I think that, you know, no one should be surprised when there's some, you know, when there's a little bit of reckless behavior. What people were not considering is, what is this a symptom of? Because people don't just drink excessively like this.

People don't take up crack cocaine just because they had the money in their pocket. What are they coping with? And what do you think is a symptom of? Well, in the more that I talk to men and more that I talk to researchers who talk to this workforce, in one word, it's loneliness, the geographic loneliness of it. It's cold. It's dark. You can't really go anywhere. And the Wi-Fi signal, I mean, this sounds so trivial, but when this is your only window to the world, when this is your only connection to your family, that's a pretty important thing. And when you're fighting for it with a thousand other people and you can't really get through and there's something going down at

your family, you can't be there for your family. And it's this paradox where you are here to be the provider so that your family can live the good life and yet you're powerless to really provide for them in any other way. That actually makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like very empathetic towards how someone would feel isolated. And, you know, of course, I'm sure we're not talking about everyone in the oil sands here. A lot of people were able to buy a house and buy a car and build a solid middle class life. But, you know, talking about people like Chris, who are suffering with that isolation or maybe substance abuse, I can imagine it might be hard to talk about this in this sort of

hyper-masculine culture. Chris is pretty open about the fact that he has, that he's been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But mental health is, you know, mental illnesses are not rare. I mean, you know, look at the person on your left and look at the person on your right. And there's a chance that maybe all three of you have a mental illness. So, you know, to say that, oh, some people just shouldn't be working there, they're not built for it. What other industry, what other career would we say that about? And I bring that point up because I hear it a lot. That's sort of part of the tough attitude is, you know, guys like Chris shouldn't even be working in there because, you know, they're not stable enough or something.

Chris finally described getting on the road to mental health treatment because of an incident at work. One of the guys went to give me a signal to do something with the crane, and he looked up and I was crying. He saw me as a safety issue because I hadn't been paying attention all day. My mind was elsewhere, and then he saw me crying in the crate. And it was at that point that it was escalated to my foreman and off the chart and eventually it was project manager that made the decision that we can't have you on site until we find out what's going on with you what do you make

of treating mental health like a kind of workplace safety issue in these environments you know to be fair you know it's my understanding that this industry does take safety very seriously. There's a lot of... It's like a religion. I don't think it's such a bad thing that they see it this way, because if the end result is that this person gets help, then that's great. And that was the case for Chris. However, for a lot of men, understandably, they fear that if I come forward as someone who is in a really bad place, if someone sees me crying, I'm not going to work again. Right. You'll look unreliable. Unreliable. I'm replaceable. They're just going to find another pipe fitter. They're just going to find another welder.

And so it is a duty to my family and a duty to myself that I suck it up. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. You know, your documentary is sort of set in boom times, right? When the oil sands were doing very well. But obviously the bust followed the boom and Alberta went through a severe economic recession. The recovery hasn't been as robust as many people would have hoped. And what is the impact of that increased economic hardship been since?

Has it made things worse? It seems that it has made things worse. It seems that it has made things worse. We were able to reach a couple of families who lost a son or a husband during the recession. Anecdotally speaking, from mental health professionals, they've been called in to intervene to provide post-traumatic stress counseling. As a result of this, some companies have brought in professionals for consulting on how they can prevent this from happening in the future. They're also stepping up their game in terms of the amenities that they provide that could sort of stave off the boredom and loneliness. Watching this documentary, I have to say, I didn't realize this was going on. And whenever we do stories about Alberta, the economy or the oil and gas industry, we always hear that the rest of Canada doesn't understand what Alberta is dealing with. You're at your kid's hockey game, you're trying to watch them play a game and enjoy it,

and you're sitting there stressed out about how am I going to pay the power bill next month. It takes the enjoyment out of your life and it makes things a little tough. When do you think about all this? All day. Do you think this story is indicative of that? Yes and no. I think it is. I think that it's important for all Canadians to see this documentary because it humanizes this workforce that is often vilified. And treat it as if they're not just average people like you and me, people with families. And, you know, there's a lot of stereotypes that they're single, uneducated men living with reckless abandon. That's really not true.

reckless abandon. That's really not true. The average worker there is married or in a common law relationship, some sort of post-secondary education. But I also think that it's indicative of a lack of understanding that Albertans have of the workforce, and even some people in the workforce have of themselves. We've known for a long time that there's a very high rate of substance abuse and kind of impulsive and reckless behavior. Until the suicides, no one was really considering what maybe this is a symptom of, what maybe they are dealing with. What is it like to actually be working in that sort of isolation physically and psychologically? You know, one question I wanted to ask you is I understand you've had some negative reaction to this documentary. And can you tell me about that? Why? It's a funny thing. We were so careful not to politicize this. We knew we could.

And we knew that we could either way, you know, we could use it as sort of a rallying call to build more pipelines or we could use it as a rallying call to shut them down. tweet out some of the reporting that I've done on this in the past and the documentary now and say, look, men are literally dying because there's not enough jobs and Ottawa doesn't care. And I've seen people tweet it out and say that, you know, the oil sands does not just take, it is not just eroding our environment. It is eroding our young men. And thus we should shut down the oil sands. And that's really not what this is about. It's unfortunate that the oil sands has become such a divisive force in this country because the people who work there, they're just such average people, you know. They want what everyone else wants. And, you know, they don't deserve to be sort of stuck in the middle like this. And, of course, with this election right now, we're seeing this issue constantly being brought up. Yeah.

It does feel like they're stuck in the middle no matter what. One last question before you go. Chris, one of the main characters in your documentary, he's really quite endearing, I have to say. How's he doing? Chris is doing pretty good. When I had that first conversation, I was given access to a wealth of resources that I didn't know and I'm sure many other people don't know are available. You know, there's entire programs and branches of our province's medical services and all sorts of things

devoted to, you know, mental health. You know, even though the recession was devastating for a lot of people, Chris will tell you that if it wasn't for the recession, he wouldn't have been able to sort of regroup and reprioritize what he wanted in life and kind of slow down and take care of himself. Omar, thank you so much for this conversation. It's hard enough to get people to talk about mental health, this issue in particular, you know, mental health involving men in a very sort of masculine environment.

You know, I think it's such an important issue, and thank you for being here. I'm just so grateful that you're shining some light on it. Thank you so much. So Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is in the U.S. this week promoting the province's energy industry. And he thinks Alberta oil ought to be looking especially attractive to American investment in light of the attacks on the Saudi oil supply. Here's part of what he had to say to Bloomberg earlier this week. Well, it's obviously always a question that's been, I mean, Saudi Arabia is surrounded by Yemen in a huge civil war, Iran a belligerent enemy of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, this is not a friendly neighborhood. There is no security premium for Alberta energy. We have the most, with the safest

and most reliable major source of energy on the face of the planet and for Americans that is a great benefit. That's all for today. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner and see you all tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.