Almost a million deaths a year. Not for accidents at work, not for accidents. Due to stress, precariousness, impossible schedules. They call them “psychosocial risks”. We call them “hard weeks” and move on: it’s a type of fatigue that you don’t see when you clock in. It doesn’t leave marks on your hands, it isn’t measured in overtime hours. It accumulates slowly, between an email at 11pm and the phone that vibrates even on Sundays, between short contracts and objectives that change every month. It’s the one that stays with you when you come home and can’t really switch off.
In recent years this pressure has taken shape in numbers. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates over 840,000 deaths each year linked to psychosocial risks at work, such as chronic stress, excessive hours and job insecurity. A fact that moves the topic out of the private sphere and brings it into public health, where it now weighs as much as other more visible factors.
According to the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA), almost 45% of European workers report mental health risk factors. Stress, anxiety and depression represent the second most common work-related health problem on the continent.
Work produces pressure, pressure becomes a symptom, the symptom is returned to the individual as a personal problem. Do you sleep badly? Manage stress. Do you have anxiety before opening the email? Work on resilience. Do you feel empty after months of precariousness, availability and unattainable goals? Learn to organize yourself better. It is a convenient translation, because it leaves the mechanism that consumes intact and shifts the repair to those who are already consumed.
The invisible cost that the system does not record
In Italy the phenomenon emerges slowly, but the data is starting to keep pace. In 2024, there were over 272 thousand new users of mental health services, with more than 10 million local services provided. Numbers that tell of a system already under pressure, even before actually tackling the issue of work. The problem is that this suffering comes late to the public radar. When it enters the health services it has already become something structured: persistent anxiety, depression, burnout. Everything that happens before, the daily wear and tear, remains out of the most visible statistics.
Yet, that is precisely where the game is played. Contemporary work has changed pace: fewer boundaries between free time and working time, more continuous exposure, more precariousness. The result is a constant tension that never really releases. INAIL, in 2025, updated its tools to evaluate work-related stress, including factors such as remote working and the impact of new technologies. A clear signal: the problem exists, it is growing, and it needs to be measured better.
A concrete proposal: the national psychological network
The “Right to Feel Well” proposal fits into this scenario, arriving in Parliament with over 70 thousand signatures. The idea is to build a public, accessible and widespread psychological network capable of intercepting discomfort before it becomes a health emergency. It is not just a question of increasing services, but of changing the entry point: bringing psychological support closer to daily life, in the territories and also in the workplace.
The National Council of the Order of Psychologists (CNOP) reports that the basic psychologist is already present or foreseen in various Regions, but a stable national structure is still missing. This creates an unequal geography: some areas begin to build responses, others remain uncovered. Meanwhile, the discomfort grows uniformly.
The issue becomes more complicated with the ever-increasing entry of technology into work processes. Smart working, continuous availability, digital platforms: useful tools, which however extend working time to the point of making it indistinct.
The boundary between presence and absence becomes thinner. And when the border disappears, recovery becomes more difficult. European studies show that intensive use of technologies, especially without clear rules, is associated with greater mental fatigue and difficulty concentrating. Work enters the domestic space and stays there.
A collective problem, not an individual one
For years, work-related psychological distress has been treated as a private matter: personal resilience, stress management, individual ability to adapt. This reading no longer holds true today. The numbers indicate a structural, widespread phenomenon, with significant social and economic impacts. A national psychological network would have precisely this function: moving the problem from the individual to the system. Intervene earlier, lighten the burden on health services, reduce the impact in the long term.
A national psychological network would also serve to break this elegant trick: calling “corporate well-being” what often comes after years of toxic loads, compressed shifts, fear of losing one’s job and permanent availability. Psychological support becomes serious when it stops being a gentle patch on the same fabric that continues to tear. Because work continues to be measured in productivity, absences, performance, turnover. Meanwhile, somewhere, someone stays awake at three in the morning with their phone on the bedside table and their head still in the office. That item doesn’t enter any balance sheet, but always presents the bill.
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