Video: Emotional wellness
An introduction to the emotional wellness module of Sailors’ Society’s Wellness at Sea programme – now available online.
Understanding your emotional wellness
Seeing the signs and know what to do about it
How are you doing? We trust that you’ve found the information that we’ve shared through the Wellness at Sea Awareness campaign up to now, meaningful. Previously, we’ve discussed the difference between mental health and mental illness and also talked about the many myths that are so often associated with mental health. In this cycle, we’ll be digging deeper and exploring a bit more about depression and anxiety and what you can do to cope with life at sea.
As I’ve said before, these are challenging times for us all. The current pandemic has plunged the world into uncertainty and it is only natural to feel stressed, concerned, angry or anxious. Even before the pandemic, the mental stress that many seafarers can experience was a massive concern.
Wellness Statistics from Yale University (2019)
- 25% of seafarers completing a patient health questionnaire had scores suggesting signs of depression (significantly higher than other working and general populations)
- 17% of seafarers completing a generalised anxiety disorder questionnaire were defined as seafarers with anxiety
- 20% of seafarers surveyed had suicidal thoughts, either several days (12.5%), more than half the days (5%) or nearly every day (2%) over the two weeks prior to taking the survey
- Depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts were associated with increased likelihood of injury and illness while working on board the vessel
- Seafarer depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts were associated with increased likelihood of planning to leave work as a seafarer in the next six months
