‘Last year alone, 600,000 mental health disorders with disabling results, i.e. sick leave, were reported in our country’. Dr José Manuel Vicente Pardo, director of the UCAM Chair of Evaluative and Expert Medicine, began his speech at the roundtable promoted by the University 'Taking care of our Mental Health, without losing our heads while we are at it', at the II Congreso Internacional y XIII Congreso Español de Medicina y Enfermería en el Trabajo (II International Congress and XIII Spanish Congress on Occupational Medicine and Nursing), held at the El Batel Auditorium and Conference Centre.  

Vicente Pardo recalled that, although these processes are classified as minor psychiatric disorders, ‘we are talking about anxiety, stress, adaptive disorders, and this definition seeks to separate them from other more complex ones, such as psychopathy. However, in terms of absenteeism, they are very significant, as they involve a huge consumption of resources, because they usually entail long-term sick leave’. In addition, he explained that ‘Spain is one of the countries with the highest consumption of diazepam, up to 100,000 packs were dispensed in 2023’. The relationship between mental health and the workplace is ambivalent, because on the one hand our job gives us comfort and security, and on the other hand, it can be a source of conflict and one of the factors in the worsening of health, mood, depression and substance abuse. 

These are some of the observations that Dr José Manuel Vicente Pardo shared with those attending this congress at a first round table moderated by Dr Araceli López-Guillén, also director - with him - of the UCAM Chair of Evaluative and Expert Medicine, who stressed that the problem lies in the fact that ‘preventive measures are not adequate; we must strengthen prevention services in companies and develop joint work between Spanish healthcare and companies that generates effective actions, and which provide long-term results’. ‘Conferences like this one contribute to highlighting this problem and to creating spaces for discussion to find solutions’, she concluded.