In Germany, both the social partners and the institutions responsible for health and safety in the workplace pay great attention to mental strain and stress in the workplace. Successful prevention programmes have already been in place for many years in this area. This is a response to developments and changes taking place in the world of work and work organisation.
A statistical analysis of the group of disorders known as depression is difficult in Germany. There are no statistical details on mental health disability and type of employment, unemployment or rehabilitation because the Federal Statistics Office makes no distinction between mental/emotional disabilities and paraplegia, cerebral disorders or addictive illnesses. As a result, in Germany, epidemiological information regarding mental illnesses or mental health disabilities is limited.
Care at the workplace, including the prevention of illnesses, and the rehabilitation of disabled persons is addressed through a comprehensive and differentiated social insurance system with branches in unemployment insurance, statutory health insurance, and statutory accident insurance funds. Yet, again, there is no statistical information regarding the number of persons concerned with mental health disabilities.
Studies assume that more than half of all depressive disorders are still not recognised by physicians. An improvement in initial and further training is urgently needed, mainly in the domain of general medical practice. The focal points should be diagnosis and suicide prevention.
Despite growing efforts made over the last decade to research the reasons for the genesis and persistence of depressive disorders, the present state of knowledge is inadequate. To change this it would help to implement targeted promotion of interdisciplinary research approaches, integrating neurobiology, psychophysiology and cognitive psychology. In view of the increased risk that the children of depressive parents will themselves develop a psychiatric disorder during their lifetime, it would be important to know more about illness-inducing or health-promoting family-related factors.1
Mental health disorders display high prevalence rates. Although the level of research in psychology provides favourable conditions for the development of suitable prevention measures, there have, to date, only been a limited number of implemented and tested prevention programmes. Moreover, only a few research programmes have addressed the development and evaluation of disorder-specific prevention programmes which can be applied in practice
