Each year, World Mental Health Day creates an opportunity to examine how mental health is understood and supported. This year’s WHO campaign – “Lived experiences heard: real voices, real change” – focuses on a crucial distinction: listening to people with lived experience is not the same as giving them a meaningful role in shaping the decisions that affect their lives.
This distinction is particularly relevant at sea.
Seafarers are often encouraged to speak openly about burnout, psychological distress and other well-being concerns. Yet the focus on disclosure can place too much responsibility on the individual. It asks crew members to find the courage to speak without first addressing what may happen when they do.
The question is not how to get crew members to speak up, but how to build a system in which speaking up is safe and leads to action.
Well-being is a shared responsibility
Mental health at sea is shaped by many factors, including leadership, working conditions, organisational structures, career pressures and wider industry practices.
No single programme or intervention can address them all, and responsibility cannot rest primarily with seafarers. It must be shared by onboard leaders, shoreside management and senior decision-makers. This requires structural changes that create the conditions for well-being initiatives to work.
Three changes are particularly important.
Protect career security
Crew members should be able to disclose burnout, psychological distress or other well-being concerns without fear of damage to their reputations or careers.
This is a complex issue because medical fitness, operational safety and mental health can intersect. However, treating every disclosure as an operational risk may reinforce stigma and confirm crew members’ fears that speaking honestly could cost them their livelihoods.
Crew members need clear protections and confidential ways to raise concerns, so asking for support is not automatically seen as a sign that they cannot perform their roles safely. Without confidence in those protections, calls for openness are unlikely to result in honest conversations.
Let leaders set the tone for onboard culture
Awareness campaigns and conversations about mental health have value, but they cannot compensate for the reality of onboard culture.
Senior and middle managers set the tone for how crew members communicate, work across departments and respond when someone is struggling. They can build trust and connection, but they can also become a source of stress.
Supporting well-being should therefore be treated as a core leadership responsibility. Leaders need to know how to listen without judgement, respond appropriately and recognise how their own behaviour affects the people around them. Organisations must then hold them accountable for the cultures they create and maintain.
Turn feedback into visible action
Even when crew members feel free to speak up, and it appears that leadership is listening, there is still no guarantee that their concerns will lead to change. Over time, this creates a sense of futility. Crew members need to see evidence of action.
Someone on board and someone ashore should be responsible for reviewing concerns, bringing them to senior leadership and following the response through. Not every request can be met, but crew members deserve to know that their concerns have been heard and what will happen next.
That follow-through shows them that their experiences are not simply being recorded. They are helping to shape decisions, actions and future policies.
From listening to change
The lived experience of seafarers who have faced mental health challenges provides knowledge that cannot be gained from policies, surveys or professional expertise alone. Crew members can identify pressures, barriers and other issues that may otherwise remain invisible to decision-makers.
Their experiences should not simply be collected after decisions are made, but used to help shape them.
Listening is essential, but meaningful engagement requires organisations to protect those who speak, foster a healthy onboard culture that begins with leadership and ensure that feedback leads to a visible response. This means building a system that supports all three goals.
SHAREABLE INSIGHTS
- Asking crew members to speak up is not enough. They need to know that doing so is safe and that their concerns will receive a real response.
- Mental health at sea is shaped by leadership, working conditions, organisational structures and career pressures. Responsibility does rest with the individual alone.
- When crew feedback repeatedly leads nowhere, silence can begin to feel safer than speaking up.
- Leaders at sea don’t just support onboard culture. They set the tone through their own behaviour.
