‘Cracked under the pressure’: Alarm sounded as postal worker suicides quadruple

Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. The Postal Inspection Service qualifies all of its crime figures — from burglaries to robberies to homicides, suicides and assaults — by saying in the report, “Though not all of these reports are credible, the Inspection Service takes all reports of violent crime seriously and responds to every reported incident.” Based on the Postal Service’s reported 635,350 total career and non-career employees in 2023, the suicide rate for postal employees would be about 31.6 per 100,000 people, if all 201 reported suicides involved Postal Service employees. While the Postal Service offers a “pretty good” Employee Assistance Program, Julion said the emergency response team was “an attempt to go beyond that.” “When these incidents happen out at the station, EAP comes out, talks to the carriers, and a lot of carriers are kind of skeptical, if you will, because this EAP service seemed like just the arm of the Postal Service or management,” Julion said. Julion agreed that not all of the suicides the emergency response team dealt with were “so much postal related as much as it is life, situations happening, and people not knowing how to respond or deal with them.” Still, Julion acknowledged that Postal Service employees work in a “high-stress, high-speed workplace.” “We often tell people the post office is like no other place that you’ve ever worked. While Mische wasn’t familiar with the specific statistic of 201 suicides reported in the 2023 Postal Inspection Service report, he said “it doesn't surprise me.” “Generally speaking, suicide rates with postal employees, I think that's been an issue for a long time.