SindBancários Porto Alegre e Região and Fetrafi-RS are promoting, this Tuesday (26), the Free Mental Health Conference, with the motto “Illness & Banking Work: the antisocial function of banks”. The meeting will be held from 1:30 pm to 5:00 pm, at the Union’s headquarters and online, and will discuss the psychological illness of bank employees. Registration for the event is free.
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As the organization points out, banking work in recent decades has posed challenges for the union movement and also for professionals in the mental health field. There is widespread illness in the category, and specific interventions are not being able to prevent the situation from worsening.
Although the category is emerging as one of the most medicated, tragic outcomes such as suicides are not decreasing. The explanation for this phenomenon is that, although bank employees are being treated individually, the bank is the one who is sick.
A survey carried out by the University of Brasília (UnB) shows that, between 1996 and 2005, 181 suicides were recorded in the banking sector, which means one case every 20 days. According to an ILO/WHO report, mental and behavioral disorders are the main cause of sick leave among bank employees, reaching 25% of the total in 2022, double what it was ten years earlier.
The conference seeks to gather information to demonstrate that many of the reasons behind the widespread illness of the category lie in the management model of the Brazilian financial system. The proposal is to show how the violation of constitutional and legal principles, especially those set out in the 1988 Constitution and Law 8,080/1990, has allowed the institutionalization of exceptional practices in bank management, with devastating repercussions on the mental health of the category.
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Registration is free and is open / Reproduction
Because of this, through an interdisciplinary and intersectoral dialogue, the Conference aims to rescue the ties that unite the social function of property and respect for human rights, with the guarantee of mental health policies that promote, protect and restore health within the scope of labor relations.
“We need to renew our way of understanding mental health and the role that violations of rights play in illness. Banks today are laboratories of psychological violence. Thousands of bank employees take time off work every year due to the harassing practices of banks. But this burden does not just fall on workers and their families. The whole of society bears the consequences of banks not only not fulfilling a social function, but also performing a true anti-social function in society”, analyzes André Guerra, psychologist and technical advisor at the Health Department of SindBancários Porto Alegre and Region and Fetrafi-RS.
Check the schedule and register for free through the Sympla website.
Source: BdF Rio Grande do Sul
Editing: Marcelo Ferreira
