Speaker
Description
Overseas studies and emerging data from within Aotearoa New Zealand indicate that those working in forest environments experience a significantly elevated risk of suicide. Yet the limited research conducted within global forest industries has primarily focused on psychosocial conditions and their health impacts, under-recognizing how structural and cultural forces interact to shape workers’ responses to stress and distress.
This presentation offers an explanatory account of how stress and wellbeing are constructed by logging machine operators, drawing on constructivist grounded theory to centre the lived experiences of 27 participants. The analysis demonstrates that wellbeing arises from the dynamic interplay between an operator’s habitus, the embodied dispositions, values, and cultural logics shaped through the logging lifeworld, and the structural determinants of the psychosocial conditions they face. This challenges the prevailing assumption that mental health outcomes in high-risk industries can be understood primarily as responses to environmental stressors, showing instead that they are culturally mediated and shaped by how operators navigate production pressures, hierarchy, identity, and control.
This reframing responds directly to the conference theme of enabling resilience through innovation by demonstrating why effective suicide-prevention and wellbeing initiatives must address both structural determinants and the cultural logics that shape coping. It highlights how the same psychosocial environment can produce markedly different wellbeing outcomes depending on the operator’s habitus and their position within the crew and contracting hierarchy.
This perspective provides a foundation for co-designing interventions that are both culturally grounded and structurally informed. A brief case example, drawn from a separate study that developed a video-based operator training system, illustrates how centring operator habitus and lived experience can inform more effective, context-aligned intervention design. Together, these insights offer a reframed understanding of suicide risk in forestry and point toward innovative, lived-experience-led approaches to prevention in high-risk work settings.
| Keywords | Operators; psychosocial; interventions; resilience |
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