On the occasion of the upcoming October 10, International Mental Health Day, the public debate is once again filled with good intentions and calls to break stigmas. However, data continues to reveal an increasingly strained system, which intervenes when the damage is already done. An eloquent example is the recent balance sheet of Hospital Sant Joan de Déu, which during 2025 exceeded 450,000 mental health consultations and attended to more than 44,000 people facing new vulnerabilities. This pressure highlights that relying solely on the clinical solution is totally insufficient.
On the other hand, as also pointed out by the report of the Catalan Society of Clinical Psychology (SCPC-ACAPIR, 2026), Mental health in Catalonia: between institutional discourse and real practice, we live in a reality where more than 80% of professionals confirm that a large part of consultations have a social or contextual origin that is not resolved with individual therapy.
This dysfunction becomes evident at work. When work-related discomfort worsens and the mental health of workers is affected, the problem falls on the healthcare system, which tends to individualize and medicalize the situation — when it would be preferable for the person's company to have anticipated, evaluating their well-being from a complete and specific perspective. The consequence is the collapse of primary care and the specialized network, where the average wait between visits reaches 45 days for adults and exceeds two months for young people, making any continuous psychotherapeutic process unfeasible.
However, for many companies, especially small ones, psychosocial prevention may not end up being the barometer that allows building adapted well-being strategies to be implemented according to their needs. As an example, the questionnaires that make up part of the information to be obtained, and which could be valid for large companies, for a small one, do not guarantee anonymity, a fact that can condition employees' responses.
Faced with this challenge, which is to go beyond psychosocial prevention, the future reform of the Occupational Risk Prevention Law —expected to come into force on January 2, 2027— opens an indispensable opportunity to change the paradigm. The text, which will precede a specific regulation on psychosocial matters, will, for the first time, oblige companies to concretely evaluate stress, anxiety, harassment, and cyber-harassment at work. In addition, it reinforces the fundamental right to digital disconnection to combat technostress and demands the incorporation of gender and age perspectives in risk analyses.
"Preventing occupational health means reviewing workloads, guaranteeing breaks, providing autonomy, and building safe environments based on professional well-being strategies."
This regulatory update must mark the end of what we might call "cosmetic" responses —such as offering one-off mindfulness workshops or self-care applications that, although conceived with the best intentions, do not respond to any prior prospecting, and place the responsibility of working on their own well-being on the staff—. Preventing occupational health means reviewing workloads, guaranteeing breaks, providing autonomy, and building safe environments based on professional well-being strategies. At the same time, real intersectoral collaboration between companies, social services, and the community network must be articulated, so as not to divert workplace situations that could be resolved within the company to the healthcare system.
This October 10 should serve to take action and raise awareness that the mental health of workers should not be primarily treated in the offices of healthcare centers, but in the environments where our daily lives unfold. The legal horizon of 2027 reminds us that the world of work has an unavoidable responsibility: to stop waiting for workers to collapse and start designing work spaces that protect, care for, and sustain their dignity.