As resilient as it gets

World Mental Health Day was marked on 10 October, with this year’s focus on listening to people with lived experience of mental health problems. A few days later, on 13 October in Brussels, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) launched its new Healthy Workplaces Campaign 2026-2028, “Together for Mental Health at Work”, dedicated to preventing psychosocial risks in the workplace. Two events so close together on the calendar raise a question worth taking the time to consider: when we talk about mental health at work, where are we looking?

In recent years, few words have enjoyed the good fortune of “resilience”. It appears in national plans, training courses and job interviews, and it almost always refers to a quality expected of people: the ability to absorb blows, adapt and carry on. In engineering, the word has a much more precise meaning: resilience is a property of materials, and it measures the energy a material can absorb on impact before it breaks.

Yet no designer would entrust a structure’s safety to the resilience of its materials alone without first addressing the loads and environmental operating conditions it will have to work under.

For a long time, occupational safety also looked for the causes of accidents in individual carelessness or imprudence. It took decades for attention to shift towards machinery, environments and procedures, and for people to accept that an accident almost always says something about the organisation in which it happens, too. When it comes to mental health, this transition is still under way. The problem still tends to be seen as a personal matter, a fragility to be managed in private, something that concerns the person who is unwell more than the context in which they are unwell.

EU-OSHA’s OSH Pulse 2025 survey of more than 28,000 workers across Europe offers a fairly clear picture. Some 29% say they suffer from stress, anxiety or depression caused or made worse by work, and almost half (45%) report being exposed to risks to their mental wellbeing.

When we look at what these risks are, the list speaks for itself: 44% report severe pressure related to deadlines or workload, one in three feel their efforts go unnoticed, and almost 30% complain of inadequate communication or cooperation.

All of these factors depend on how work is designed, distributed and recognised, far more than on the character or emotional stamina of the people doing it.

Environmental assessments, from contaminated site remediation to impact management, rest on a precise framework: a source that generates a pressure, a pathway through which it spreads, and a receptor that may be affected by it. Intervention strategies follow the same logic and, wherever possible, start from the source, because protecting only those who are exposed leaves the problem exactly where it is.

Occupational safety legislation has long taken the same approach. The European Framework Directive 89/391 already listed combating risks at source and adapting work to the individual among its general principles of prevention. In Italy, the Consolidated Act on Occupational Health and Safety requires collective measures to take priority over individual ones and explicitly includes work-related stress among the risks to be assessed.

Applied to mental health, this framework also gives us a more accurate reading of the support tools many organisations have introduced in recent years. They provide real, valuable support to those who need it, but within this framework they sit on the receptor’s side.

In the hierarchy of prevention measures, personal protective equipment comes last, when the risk cannot be eliminated or reduced in any other way. Asking people to become more resilient without addressing workloads, deadlines and role clarity ultimately means starting from the bottom rung.

Compared with noise, dust or chemical agents, psychosocial risks have one characteristic that makes them harder to manage: they cannot be seen. There is no instrument to measure their concentration and no limit value that triggers an alarm. Their effects also often emerge late, when distress has already turned into something more serious.

Anyone who has supported a friend or family member through the hardest moments of a mental disorder will recognise the same difficulty: the struggle to understand an illness that cannot be seen and the even harder feeling of not knowing how to help. Over time, you learn that the most useful thing is often also the simplest: being there, listening without immediately looking for a solution, and accepting that some days will be heavier than others.

This year’s World Mental Health Day theme points the same way, inviting us to listen to those who have been through the suffering themselves. The assessment of work-related stress also involves consulting workers and gathering their perceptions: what cannot be seen can, in many cases, still be heard.

Many people could not be more resilient than they already are. What we can still change, as in any good design, is the load and the environment.

Talking can help, even with someone you don’t know. These services are also available to people supporting someone in difficulty who don’t know how to help.

• Telefono Amico Italia: 02 2327 2327, every day, 24 hours a day
• Samaritans Onlus: 06 77208977, every day, 1 pm to 10 pm
• Your GP or local Mental Health Centre
• In an emergency: 112

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