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

Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis and needs emotional support, help is available 24/7 via call or text at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.

Over the course of nearly 20 years, Carlos Ulloa has worked for the United States Postal Service in a range of capacities — from starting as a letter carrier to delivering parcels to driving trucks and serving as a supervisor of distribution operations.

But after two mental health episodes in the last four years due to work-related stress, Ulloa, of Belleville, N.J., transitioned to a custodial role at a national distribution center in Jersey City.

“My plans were to move up, to keep going up and not to end up as a custodian, cleaning bathrooms and floors and stuff like that,” Ulloa told Raw Story. “I was supposed to continue to grow up and stay into management after I was promoted.”

But about four years ago, Ulloa said a new plant manager “started putting me down in front of my own suit, my own employees, yelling and screaming and whistling and pointing his finger at me.” The manager would talk to him like he was “some kind of dog” and expected him to give up his weekends and work overtime — when he was already frequently late getting his grandkids to school and providing transportation for his daughter, Ulloa said.

One day Ulloa showed up to work intoxicated and ended up being reported missing after leaving the building and hiding in his attic.

“I guess I cracked under the pressure,” Ulloa said.

Postal inspectors, postal police officers and ambulance crews came to his home and took him to a hospital, where he was later put in a psychiatric ward for trying to run away, he said. Ulloa began seeing a psychiatrist every day for about five months where he said they discussed “any sadness, any problems, that we want to take our lives, alcohol, drugs.”

When Ulloa was ready to return to work, he was told that he couldn’t return to the same facility and was asked where he might want to be transferred to continue as a supervisor or potentially grow into other leadership roles.

That’s when Ulloa decided he didn't want to be in management anymore with “too much stress, too much going on.” He decided he’d be better off working as a mechanic or in maintenance.

However, the new custodial job didn’t provide the stress relief Ulloa was seeking either as he said his new supervisor bullied and harassed him, too. Last December, Ulloa told a supervisor he was considering ending his life due to work pressure.

One of Ulloa’s friends, a postal police officer who was off-duty at the time, was able to calm him down over the phone and drove to the facility to ensure Ulloa didn’t harm himself and was given medical attention. He spent another week in a psychiatric hospital.

“I used to never have a depression problem. Now, I gotta take pills for the depression problems,” said Ulloa, adding that he would like to see the Postal Service “be more supportive, maybe more aware of, especially upper management, to see their own supervisors or other managers how they treat employees.”

Ulloa isn’t the only Postal Service employee to recently deal with suicidal ideation. The latest annual report for the United States Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement branch of the Postal Service, revealed that 201 suicides were reported in its fiscal year 2023.

That’s more than quadruple the 47 suicides reported by the Postal Inspection Service in fiscal year 2022.

And it’s more than double the national suicide rate for the general population of 14.2 deaths per 100,000 people, according to 2022 figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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.

Spencer Block, a public information officer for the Postal Inspection Service's Chicago headquarters referred Raw Story to the Postal Service headquarters. Spokespeople for the Postal Service and the Postal Inspection Service did not respond to Raw Story’s multiple requests for comment. Neither responded to clarifying questions about the suicide and crime statistics reported.

The need for a volunteer emergency response team

Thirty volunteers from the National Association of Letter Carriers union formed an emergency response team in March due to “concern with the letter carriers being assaulted out there on the street, issues of substance abuse, mental health issues that we saw within our craft,” Mack Julion, assistant secretary-treasurer for the National Association of Letter Carriers, told Raw Story.

Julion, who has been a letter carrier in Chicago since 1997, said the group has seen “quite a few this year” in terms of suicides by letter carriers and has responded to such incidents and other traumatic events by visiting affected facilities where members might be upset. The program is based off of the emergency response team model from the United Steelworkers union, and volunteers received certifications from the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc..

“One traumatic incident could lead to more traumatic incidents, more trauma, if not properly dealt with,” Julion said. “It is healthy to address and deal with these traumatic situations and help people process their grief, because without that, that could lead to more trauma.”

In particular, violence against letter carriers has been an ongoing issue over the last five years, according to a Raw Story investigation that found a 543 percent increase in robberies of postal workers between 2019 and 2022.

Khalalisa Norris, a letter carrier in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, twice experienced gun violence on the job, most recently being robbed in January 2023 at gun point for her arrow keys — the antiquated universal keys that thieves target to unlock numerous mailboxes in a given zip code.

Khalalisa Norris, 46, was robbed at gunpoint while working as a letter carrier on Chicago's West side. Norris met with Raw Story on Feb. 19 in the nearby Chicago suburb, Oak Park, Ill. (Photo by Alexandria Jacobson/Raw Story)

Norris told Raw Story in November that she still hasn’t been able to return to her full mail route out of fear after her robbery experience and that she still sees a psychiatrist for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. She said she’s been working with her union to push Congress for more safety protections for letter carriers.

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. “By us having our own people going out, talking with our people and literally getting trained to go out to deal with these situations is very helpful.”

Julion said June was a particularly busy month for the emergency response team, which has two volunteers located in each of its 15 regions. He estimated that four suicides were reported within two weeks.

One incident the team responded to this year involved an attempted suicide at a post office in Aurora, Co., where a man expressed stress about his wife potentially being deported. He was saved when an office door was broken down to stop him.

A Marine Corps veteran committed suicide after “dealing with depression and suicidal ideation for some time,” Julion said. The unadjusted rate of suicide for veterans in 2021 was 33.9 per 100,000 people, according to a 2023 annual report from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

In October 2021, a letter carrier committed a double murder-suicide at a sorting facility in Memphis, killing a supervisor and manager before killing himself, AP reported. Experts said the COVID-19 pandemic added extra stress to Postal Service employees at the time.

Frank Albergo, president of the Postal Police Officers Association, told Raw Story that postal police officers, the Postal Service’s own uniformed police force, formerly patrolled that Memphis facility before the union became embroiled in a four-year-long dispute with the Postal Service about its ability to protect letter carriers and the mail off postal property.

“We rarely patrol it anymore because we just don't have the manpower,” Albergo said. “That would have been something that we might have been able to prevent. Whether or not we could prevent it, we'll never know, but we never even had the chance. That's the problem.”

‘Doesn't surprise me’: A history of postal employee suicides

The circumstances around suicides are “complex” and don’t always involved mental illness, Erich Mische, CEO of suicide education nonprofit, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, told Raw Story.

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. We feel we are the best at what we do. We deliver everything, everywhere, every day. Rain, snow, sleet, hail, COVID, we deliver,” Julion said. “It’s what we do, and to have a sort of expectation like that, you can imagine the kind of pace that we work at on the inside and the kind of pressures that can be put on us to deliver, particularly if there's issues of understaffing.”

Letter carriers, particularly, often take pride in servicing the American people and don’t want to disappoint customers, which can “drive people crazy,” Julion said.

Ulloa said he certainly felt that level of pressure.

“The post office is just stressful enough, just to know that you have a time limit to get the mail out or the packages out and stuff like that,” Ulloa said. “I understand that we all push it and everything else, but they always want more with less people, and then the people won't stay because the management just doesn't grow with them.”

Before becoming a postal police officer, Albergo was a letter carrier and still has nightmares about the job due to the “stressful environment,” he told Raw Story.

“All I can tell you is I was a letter carrier for six years. I would not want to be a letter carrier now,” Albergo said.

Harassment and abuse has “always been a problem in the Postal Service,” Albergo said, noting that workplace stress and violence has been an issue for more than 30 years, according to a February 1992 joint statement signed by postal unions. The statement was released in the wake of a quadruple murder-suicide in Royal Oaks, Mich., where a terminated employee fired more than 100 shots at a post office, killing four employees before killing himself.

“We openly acknowledge that in some places or units there is an unacceptable level of stress in the workplace; that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of violence or any threats of violence by anyone at any level of the Postal Service; and that there is no excuse for and will be no tolerance of harassment, intimidation, threats, or bullying by anyone,” the statement read.

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. I think you can go as far back as the last 10 or 20 years and find stories about suicide rates in terms of occupation for postal employees and actually federal employees," Mische said.

A December 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called out that the suicide rate for male postal service clerks was 58.2 per 100,000 civilian, non-institutionalized working persons aged 16–64 in 2021.

Mische said “job stress” and “substance abuse issues” are significant factors when looking a suicide rates by job industry.

“Any organization, whether it's a federal government agency, the Postal Service, or it's a construction company, whatever agency or company, public or private, that conversation about suicide and suicide prevention’s got to start at the top with the leadership of any organization saying we are going to make this a priority addressing the issue of suicide,” Mische said.

Leadership needs to be open about the issue of suicides in the workforce despite decades of stigma, which “has cost more lives in our society than had we spent the last several decades being open and honest about the difficult circumstances surrounding suicide,” Mische said.

Institutions that want to provide support to employees struggling with suicidal ideation or related issues should present a message to employees saying, “We're going to make making resources available to help those who may be dealing with suicidal ideation, and get them the help they need. And then, as an organization, we're going to continue to support that individual until they get to a place where they feel as though they are stable," Mische said.

The National Association of Letter Carriers’ president was unavailable for an interview. The American Postal Workers Union did not respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.

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Content warning: This article discusses suicide and self-harm. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis and needs emotional support, help is available 24/7 via call or text at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.