[in Japanese]

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 The promotion of mental health measures for workers is an important issue in occupational health. The number of workers with mental disorders has been increasing or staying at a high level in many enterprises, and occupational health staff and personnel managers are facing conditions which were seldom seen in the past or which have emerged with the increasing stress of the work environment. About 60 percent of Japanese workers have severe stress and anxiety that are related to the job or workplace. The work-related factors which strongly affect workers’ stress are changes in the qualitative workload, changes in the quantitative workload, harassment, and excessive working hours. The mental health problems of non-regular workers are sometimes discussed, but in order to plan proper measures about the problems it is necessary to conduct a multi-faceted analysis of their working life and private life.
 The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has established some guidelines for workers’ mental health. The Industrial Safety and Health Act was partially amended in 2014, and psychological stress checkups were made obligatory in enterprises other than small businesses. The future issues in occupational mental health are improvement of the work environment, cooperation between occupational health staff and psychiatric professionals, work restrictions for preventing accidents caused by psychiatric symptoms and the side effects of psychotropic agents, contributions to the improvement of productivity, and the employment of people with mental disabilities.

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Major problems for conducting screening for mental disorders in the workplace include low screening efficiency and a lack of evidence on effectiveness. Segmentation of the target population and utilization of stratum-specific likelihood ratios (SSLRs) would be key efforts to solve these problems. Depressive disorder is a high-priority disorder for workplace screening because there is evidence that appropriate care would provide benefits for the workplace as well as the person with the disorder. Recently, autism spectrum disorders and adjustment disorders have been attracting attention as screening target disorders in the workplace. Autism spectrum disorders have been acknowledged as a more common disorder than previously recognized, and individuals with autism spectrum disorders are at a high risk of associated psychiatric disorders, particularly intractable depression. Adjustment disorder is also considered to be a common work-related mental health problem, and it is associated with long-term absence due to illness and disability. If stressful work environments are properly re-designed, the prognosis of adjustment disorders could be improved, and unnecessary absence due to illness and disability could be avoided as a result. Further research is necessary to establish the performance of a screening instrument such as SSLR and to test the effectiveness of workplace screening for mental disorders by taking into account the target disorders as well as the target population.

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This article gives an overview of the recently introduced concept of work engagement: a positive, fulfilling, affective motivational state of work-related well-being. I first define work engagement as a state including vigor, dedication, and absorption, and then refer to its antecedents and consequences. Work engagement is a unique concept that is best predicted by job resources (e.g., autonomy, supervisory coaching, performance feedback) and personal resources (e.g., optimism, self-efficacy, self-esteem) and is predictive of psychological/physical health, proactive organizational behavior, and job performance. Then, I mentioned strategies how to achieve really healthy workers and workplaces. The paper closes with an account of strategic use of stress check-up system to achieve healthy workplaces.

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