Workshops, conferences, testimonials from the field and experts… How to rethink our relationships in the professional environment ? A look back at the event organized by the Alliance for Mental Health, “Focus on mental health, assessment and occupational perspectives”, held on November 19-21 in Paris.
Interviewed on the occasion of her participation in the third edition of Focus on Mental Health, Sophie Thiéry, president of the “Employment, Employment” commission of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese), detailed the path that remains to be taken in France in the field of mental health.
Mental health in France is poor, including in the field of employment. How to explain it?
In fact, we lag behind the European pack in terms of occupational health, as Eurofound surveys conducted over several decades show. This is worrying, especially since this situation is not getting better, unlike other countries.
In France, this topic is still considered taboo and is still very difficult to talk about in the world of work, even more difficult than the topic of physical health. Moreover, three major tsunamis are currently hitting the world of work. This is not a small development, a slider adjustment, but rather a radical transformation. This increases the fear of losing one’s job, the stress of facing uncertainty and forced adaptation, the anxiety of facing a loss of meaning…
What is meant by this “tsunami”?
The first is ecological turmoil: tomorrow, we must do better, with less, and at least change our model. Jobs will be lost, expanded, created. AI is also radically changing the organization of work, going beyond the human-machine relationship. This even impacts skilled trades which until recently were mostly carried out through mechanization or robotics, and spread very quickly. Recall that in 2004, it took Facebook ten months to reach one million users. ChatGPT got there in five days… Regarding the third “tsunami”, it has to do with demographics: in fifteen years, the working population will decline, a situation that has not occurred since the Second World War.
How to act in the face of these new risks?
I see this transformation as an opportunity to talk about work again (something that currently doesn’t happen much in companies) and open a dialogue. The fact that we are finally starting to use the right words, such as “mental health in the workplace”, reminds us that this issue is not the responsibility of specialists alone. And if we really want to act, we have to address the causes, namely take prevention.
It is far from simple because if the cause of worsening mental health comes from the world of work, it means questioning the fundamentals of the company: organization of tasks, supervision, articulation of private professionals, etc.
Today, there is a real urgency to change managerial practices and listen to workers. The two go hand in hand. Without this, there are risks that will not be identified. This is why, during the Labor Assizes (Sophie Thiéry is the “guarantor” of the Labor Assizes with Jean-Dominique Senard, in 2023, Editor’s note), we propose to add the “listening principle” to the nine general principles already existing in labor regulations. Several legislative proposals have been submitted in this direction, but as of now, government orders postpone their examination.
