We live under a new tyranny - and, curiously, one that smiles. It’s no longer enough to work, produce, meet deadlines, or be competent. It’s imperative to be happy. Radiant. Grateful. Preferably on Monday mornings.
This imposition of “positivity” is not merely harmless: it distorts organisational priorities, pushes structural problems under the carpet and, ultimately, is costly - in people, in productivity and in reputation.
The WHO estimates that anxiety and depression alone remove around 12 billion working days from the global economy each year, with an annual cost approaching 1 trillion dollars in lost productivity.
Some companies - sometimes the same ones that celebrate toxic leaders in board meetings - now proudly display “organisational happiness” departments, run team-building sessions with inflatables, and paint walls with words like resilience, empathy, and wellbeing. There are even awards. Certifications. Golden seals that guarantee that, in that company, being happy is mandatory. Yet there is a gulf between marketing and practice: the international literature is clear in listing the psychosocial risks that make teams ill (work overload, low control, job insecurity, harassment, long hours), and the recommendations are mostly organisational - job design, manager training, anti-harassment policies, return-to-work programmes - not “cute activities”.
✔️ Happiness? Check.
✔️ Mental health? We have it (on a PowerPoint slide).
But burnout keeps rising, anxiety is spreading, and long absences for psychological reasons have become the invisible pandemic of HR. It is worth remembering: the WHO included burnout in the ICD-11 as an “occupational phenomenon”, not a clinical diagnosis, resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is a problem of work organisation, not of “individual fragility”.
It is curious (and worrying) to observe how mental health has been turned into a buzzword, as sexy as it is volatile. It serves marketing campaigns, LinkedIn posts and to justify yet another panel at some HR conference, where people talk a lot about people, but little with them. Meanwhile, investors are beginning to look at mental-health management as an indicator of risk and governance: global benchmarks show that most large companies still report and manage this area below expectations, with direct impacts on absenteeism, turnover, and talent attraction.
Not everything is a façade. There are companies - and, thankfully, more and more of them - that treat mental health with the depth it deserves. That understands it is not about “keeping the team motivated” but about preventing the team from becoming ill. Those who are not satisfied with mindfulness on Wednesdays and free fruit in the lounge. The good news is that there are robust, evidence-based guidelines: the WHO recommends interventions at the level of job design (reducing overload, increasing autonomy), training managers to recognise and act on emotional distress, mental-health literacy for teams, and structured return-to-work programmes - solutions with measurable effects on wellbeing and performance.
But, sadly, many still paint a pretty façade while perpetuating sick workplace cultures, inhuman targets, and leadership that confuse harassment with demand. The numbers in Portugal call for urgency: in 2019, about 2.25 million people (22% of the population) were living with a mental-health disorder - above the European average - and the total costs associated with mental health were estimated at ~3.7% of GDP (with more than 40% attributed to lost productivity). In terms of years of productive life, this translated into nearly 310,000 years lost in a single year.
At MindPartner and NeuroGime, we sometimes speak with companies where the warning signs are clear: exhausted teams, bewildered leaders, an organisational climate anything but happy. And yet the chosen solution often ends up being… a workshop. One. Not out of ill will, but out of an incomplete understanding of the problem. If the risks are structural, the response must be structural: clear policies on workload and hours, review of objectives and metrics, mechanisms for employee participation, safe channels for complaints and investigation of harassment, training for middle managers, and quick access to care. This is what international guidelines repeatedly emphasise.
I challenge companies to look more closely at their turnover indicators, at sick leave, at the silences in the corridors. Because those are the real KPIs of mental health — not the number of motivational brunches or a yoga mat in the open space. In Portugal, specialised services face waiting lists and a shortage of professionals, which means organisations must prevent upstream: reducing psychosocial risks at home is often the decisive factor between losing talent through exhaustion or keeping it healthy and productive.
Mental health is not solved with a 90-minute workshop and a yoga mat in the open space. It requires a deep revision of values, practices and power relations. It means putting the issue at the centre of management - with budget, targets and accountability - and aligning HR, operations and occupational health and safety policies. The WHO is explicit: prevent psychosocial risks, protect and promote mental health, and support workers with disorders so they can participate and thrive at work. This translates into concrete decisions: adjust workloads, give autonomy, train managers, create return-to-work programmes - not slogans.
It requires courage - and that, unlike toxic positivity, is not learned in team-building.