Europe has placed mental health at the centre of its workplace safety agenda, with the European Week for Safety and Health at Work (19–24 October 2026) launching a new campaign focused entirely on preventing and managing psychosocial risks.

The campaign — “Together for Mental Health at Work” — is co-ordinated by EU-OSHA, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work, and will run until the end of 2028. It brings together employers, unions, governments and workers across the continent around a shared goal: to make psychosocial risk assessment as routine as physical risk assessment in every European workplace.

The statistics driving the campaign are stark. EU-OSHA reports that nearly half — 45 per cent — of workers across the EU face risks to their mental health at work. A separate finding reveals that around one in four European workplaces does not recognise psychosocial risk at all, leaving millions of workers without any protection from stress, burnout, harassment, and work-related anxiety or depression.

Cardiovascular disease, strongly linked to chronic workplace stress, is the second most common cause of work-related death in the EU. Researchers say the full health burden of psychosocial hazards is dramatically under-counted, in part because cause-of-death reporting rarely links heart disease or suicide to occupational exposure.

For Australian workplaces, the campaign has direct relevance. Safe Work Australia and state regulators have been progressively strengthening requirements for psychosocial risk management, and the 2026 Key WHS Statistics report includes expanded data on psychological injury claims — which have among the longest average recovery times and highest compensation costs of all workplace injury types.