Co-construction: A key to preventing mental health injuries in occupational settings

Abstract

Co-construction: A key to preventing mental health injuries in occupational settings Dr Mélanie Dufour-Poirier from the Université de Montréal and Dr Jean-Paul Dautel from the Université du Québec en Outaouais outline a new approach to preventing workplace mental health injuries and improving wellbeing. In Canada, it is estimated that mental health-related costs total approximately $50bn annually. In the province of Quebec, close to one out of two workers has experienced psychological distress since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amongst its pathogens are the porosity of working time, isolation, competition among colleagues, and the demand for short-term profitability. New - more stressful - forms of work organization, including telework, have emerged, bringing with them excessive workloads, increases in the pace of work, growing job flexibility, precarious contract employment, and job insecurity. These issues have put workplace mental health back at the centre of the debate in Quebec. More generally, the crisis has called for a rethinking of management methods for better upstream protection of mental health, ideally through a collective and participatory approach that involves all the actors in a working community rather than one that aims at protecting against and treating such mental health injuries on the level of the individual, as is the current tendency. It is an issue of the utmost importance for unions, a subject we discussed in a recent article (Open Access Government, April 2024).