Four years ago, Dubai-based Tristar Tankers lost two of its seafarers to suicide in the space of two months.

Shaken by the losses, the company's senior management decided that an immediate deep dive into the issues of seafarer mental health and suicide was needed.

"This was a very personal issue for us. We thought that we should not let these two deaths go in vain," Tristar Group founder and chief executive Eugene Mayne said at a recent safety conference focused on seafarer well-being that was organised by the company.

Tristar wanted to learn whether suicides were an industry-wide problem but found that accessing data detailing deaths was all but impossible.

"At that time, suicides at sea had been traditionally kept under the carpet," said Mayne, who lamented that the industry still wants to keep it quiet even today.

"Nobody wants to talk about it because it is perceived as a stigma for the company and the owners."

Mayne said that however sad the suicide of an employee may be, companies need to share information on the subject in order to learn, understand and do something about it.

"If we don't share, we don't learn," he said.

Tristar hosts the annual well-being and safety conference in an effort to promote industry sharing. The company invites mental-health professionals and other shipping-related companies to share their experiences and knowledge.

Data-driven solutions

Eugene Mayne, founder and chief executive of Tristar Group in Dubai. Photo: Tristar Group

But Mayne would like the industry to do a lot more.

"For any normal incident or accident we track, we trace, we go down to the root cause," he said.

"Maybe this should be the way for us with suicides because today we live in an age of data. Understanding the data might give us an idea of where the problem is. Is it a concentrated problem? Is it a repeated issue that keeps coming up? Is it a family issue or is it a working issue?"

Mayne said such knowledge would help the industry narrow down the problem, but it requires collective information sharing.

"By getting that data and being able to analyse it, we could see which areas that we as collective stakeholders can work together to drive improvements — which might be a better way forward than just saying 'call the hotline'," he said.

Psychologist Dr Deepti Mankad, the chief executive of Mind Speak, a Mumbai-based company that specialises in providing counselling services to seafarers, said the data pool remains too small despite a few studies carried out by the International Transport Workers' Federation and seafarer welfare organisations.

The information that is available paints a grim picture.

Grahaeme Henderson, Shell's former head of global shipping and who now chairs the maritime safety initiative Together in Safety, said the suicide risk for seafarers is well above that of people ashore.

Together in Safety chair Grahaeme Henderson said shipping has a suicide rate that is six times worse than that of the UK population. Photo: Global Maritime Forum

"Shipping has a suicide rate that is six times worse than that of the UK population," Henderson said at Tristar's conference. "It may be even up to 15 times worse if you also include suspicious cases.

"But these are not just numbers. They refer to people. Our people. All of us in the shipping industry need to be part of the solution."

Mankad stressed that getting information about attempted suicides is also vital if the industry wants to understand and address the situation fully, as rates of attempts are normally far higher than completed suicides.

She suggested that it was easier for companies to sweep attempted suicides under the carpet.

"The problem is that not many companies like to report attempted suicides," she said. "My request to all companies is that if something like this happens, report it. There should be a pool where people can report it.

"Some data was collected by the ITF which showed that 20% of seafarers were showing signs of suicide ideation, which means the idea of suicide was coming into their minds."

A problem Mankad identified as being faced by counselling services is that they are only approached by companies after a suicide has taken place.

"Then they say 'OK, you need to counsel the entire crew'," she said. "If it had been before, it would have been easier to understand the stress they were going through."