Everything that Queen Letizia has to say about the causes she sponsors is interesting, but if it is about mental healthit matters a little more. We do not lose sight of the fact that the job of a consort is highly demanding, so good psychic shape It is non-negotiable. The imprint of sport on your body may have a lot to do with helping your psyche cope with the pressure. It’s more than an intuition: Letizia could write a great first-person speech about sports and mental health.
On Mental Health Day 2024, the queen wanted to once again support the work of the Spanish Mental Health Confederation. Let us remember that, last year, she herself offered the journalists who follow her an irresistible headline: ‘The queen raps for mental health’. In this, he opened the day by giving one of his famous bomb-proof speeches. Letizia takes great care to contribute nothing of his harvestespecially in these delicate moments for the Crown.
Everything the queen said during her brief speech are contributions from experts, but they are ideas that subscribe and, in addition, she herself extracts the material provided to prepare for each event on her official agenda. That is why it is relevant that an impeccable Letizia did not take long to highlight the key question of the event: “Are we going to work to survive?” Surely, many nights, she asks herself this question, reflecting on the criticism her work of representation receives.
The question, not at all rhetorical, is a quote from the book of doctor and writer Eduardo Varapresent at the event. This is how Letizia underlined it: «His last book interested me because Eduardo says: We go to work to survive or take part, to participate, in a project? And he also adds that behind overexertion there are exhausted minds. Surely with his words we will better understand the link that exists between complicated work environments and mental health.
Letizia spoke at length about journalism
Next, Letizia focused on another of the issues that were discussed during the day and that concerns her especially: mental health of journalists. Nostalgia did not betray her and the queen did not make the mistake of including herself in a profession that she has not practiced for decades. Therefore, he took some conclusions from the research carried out by Mar Cabra, Spanish journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner which is now dedicated to disseminating knowledge about the mental illnesses of information professionals.
“Mar provides data on how journalists feel, you feel,” said Queen Letizia. «60% of media professionals have high levels of anxiety and one in five have symptoms of depression. By the way, one of the recent issues of the magazine published online by the Mental Health Confederation makes a very interesting review of what has happened in the last five years (…)». He talks about a report from the Ministry of Labor in which it is confirmed that there was a record last year of sick leave due to mental health.
On Mental Health Day, Queen Letizia wanted to highlight the impact of mental health problems on those who work in precarious jobs. /
«It is a very extensive report and I extract from it another piece of information that reveals that the impact on the mental health of workers in precariousness is much higher than that of workers with a better employment situation,” Queen Letizia continued to explain. She also wanted to cite an expert with whom she shared a conference on the same topic and who shared other data that Letizia wanted to highlight again.
«One of the collaborators of this report from the Ministry of Labor is the psychologist Edgar Cabanas, but I want to bring something that he said at another event of the Confederation, on October 7, in which he said very interesting things. I extract two that seemed relevant to me: three out of ten people in Spain they take some type of psychotropic drug. And the second: people with fewer economic resources take four times more of these psychotropic drugs than people who have less economic vulnerability and greater stability. “That’s the reality.”
Letizia, as we see, wanted to highlight the intensity of mental illness for work-related reasons in the most vulnerable layers of society and in the most precarious jobs, something supported by the data. It also illuminated a new figure that the Mental Health Confederation is trying to promote and professionalize: that of the mutual support agent or peer support. “They are people who have already had their own experience in mental health and who accompany other people with respect, listening without judgment and horizontality.”