The Missing Piece in Mental Health at Work

Mental health at work has never received so much attention.

Organizations invest in wellbeing programmes, psychological support, leadership training, psychosocial risk prevention, flexible working arrangements and many other initiatives designed to protect employees’ mental health.

These developments represent important progress. They have improved the way mental health is understood, discussed and supported in many workplaces.

Yet despite these efforts, stress, burnout, anxiety and psychological distress continue to affect a growing number of people.

This raises an important question: Are we still overlooking something essential?

Perhaps the answer lies not in doing more of the same, but in looking differently at both work and health.

Why Current Approaches Leave Something Out

Many existing approaches have broadened the focus beyond the individual and recognize organizational influences on mental health.

Yet they often continue to examine work through separate categories of factors or risks.

What remains less visible is work as a living system in which societal changes, organizational decisions and human activity continuously shape one another, and where mental health emerges through these ongoing interactions.

This may be one important blind spot.

A Second Blind Spot: How We Understand Health

There may also be another limitation.

Mental health is often understood through the presence or absence of symptoms such as stress, anxiety or burnout. This perspective is essential. It allows suffering to be recognized, discussed and treated.

But beyond the symptoms we observe, another question deserves attention.

What do we actually mean by health?

The philosopher and physician Georges Canguilhem proposed a profoundly different way of thinking about it. Rather than defining health simply as the absence of illness, he described it as the capacity to adapt, create new ways of functioning and continue engaging with a changing world.

From this perspective, health is not a fixed state that we either possess or lose. It is a dynamic process that is continuously shaped through our interactions with the world around us.

Bringing These Perspectives Together

These two questions may, in fact, be closely connected.

If work is a dynamic system, and health is itself a dynamic process, then understanding mental health at work requires more than identifying isolated risk factors or individual symptoms.

It requires understanding how health emerges through the continuous interactions between people, their work, the way work is organized and the broader social environment in which organizations operate.

This perspective does not replace existing approaches.

Stress, burnout, psychosocial risks and access to psychological support remain essential parts of the picture.

But they may not tell the whole story.

The Missing Piece: Human Work

There is one part of this system that often receives surprisingly little attention: the work people actually do to make work possible.

Every day, workers interpret situations that cannot be fully anticipated. They make judgments, solve unexpected problems, coordinate with others, regulate emotions, negotiate constraints, adapt to changing circumstances and continually invent practical ways of achieving quality work.

It is through this human activity that the broader environment, organizational conditions and individual capacities meet.

This is where work becomes more than a set of prescribed tasks.

It becomes a living process through which people constantly interact with their environment—and through which their mental health may also be strengthened, challenged or transformed.

Looking at Work Differently

If mental health emerges through work, then work is no longer simply the place where mental health problems appear.

It becomes one of the places where mental health is continuously created, challenged and transformed.

Understanding mental health at work therefore begins by understanding what people actually do when they work.

Perhaps this is the missing perspective we need—not to replace what we already know, but to complete it.

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If this perspective resonates with you, the upcoming “Rethinking Work” learning journey will offer an opportunity to explore these ideas through concrete workplace situations and practical reflexion.

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