The focus chosen this year for World Mental Health Day is on mental health in the workplace. It is not a minor topic that was launched by the WHO: the professional reality constitutes an important dimension in people's lives, a reality that goes far beyond the fact of representing a source of income. Work, in its presence as well as in its absence, ends up being an element that can positively or negatively affect a person's health; paraphrasing the title of a famous work by Pavese, ‘Working is tiring’ but also ‘not working’ is tiring, i.e. it wears one out, causes suffering, social exclusion, loneliness. By work, we can think of all the realities of employment that can be practiced today because, especially in the field of mental health, there are engagements that may be different from the commonly understood work but that carry all the dignity and preciousness of it. These realities, like the forms of work that correspond to the traditional meaning, enrich the community and bring a valuable contribution to the community as well as to the individual. The care of relationships, the dimension of respect, the valorisation and the opportunity to grow within one's own activity, the containment of stress, end up being, alongside many others, protective factors for mental health and, when disregarded or not taken care of, elements that compromise the well-being of the worker.
Mental health is thus an issue that occupies all spheres of life, and each deserves the care and attention needed so that it does not end up negatively affecting a person's well-being. It is not difficult to imagine how its absence or criticality inevitably affects a person's quality of life and interferes with their mental health. This makes us all the more conscious that mental health concerns everyone, that everyone is exposed to its wear and tear, that everyone is required to take up the challenge of its care. Speaking of work, the subject of this day, one immediately thinks of income. This dimension too, in its concreteness and materiality, has an impact on mental health; in fact, it is an aspect that opens (or closes) possibilities and opportunities in a person's life; but work is also structuring one's time, it is socialisation and relational opportunities, a network of knowledge and openness to meeting possibilities, as well as being invested with meaning and sense capable of giving purpose to one's life: To feel that one is building something or that one has goals in one's day, to have goals to achieve, to perceive that one can make a contribution, one's own contribution to something or someone, are not insignificant elements.
In professional life, too, it is necessary to get out of the success-failure couple and insert the dimension of meaning and effective growth within that experience. When a job loses meaning, when one does not find meaning in what one does, when human relations become strained, even if crowned by success, that job represents a risk factor for a person's mental health.
On this World Mental Health Day, the cantonal socio-psychiatric organisation together with SUPSI's Applied Psychology Competence Centre and in collaboration with Club ‘74, Pro Mente Sana and Ingrado, want to support and focus attention on wellbeing at work, on its importance in people's lives and, for this reason, to emphasise its key role in mental health. In the collaborative projects that these realities carry out, in particular in the didactic modules related to the courses for Bachelor students in Social Work at SUPSI, the theme of work - of how it is experienced, sometimes suffered rather than revalued - is often central: an object of constant reflection. Working in the field of mental health means constantly dialoguing with the lights and shadows of work, trying, where possible, to support the luminous aspects that work can bring to people's lives and containing as much as possible the wearisome aspects and those compromising well-being that, unfortunately, can be recognised in the biographical trajectories of many people marked by the experience of psychic discomfort.
Special thanks to the students of the "Methods and Techniques with Psychic Distress" module of the Bachelor in Social Work, the cantonal socio-psychiatric organisation, the Club '74 association, Pro Mente Sana Ticino and Ingrado.
#WorldMentalHealthDay