Electronic version of the Blue Book on Mental Health in the Workplace

The authoritative version of the "Electronic Version of the Blue Book on Workplace Mental Health" that is currently publicly available in China mainly comes from the workplace special section of the National Mental Health Assessment Development Report released annually by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as jointly released by domestic leading human resources service agencies and mental health medical institutions. There is no official unified single free public version of the industry survey results. Most of the electronic versions available through public channels are core data summaries and industry dismantling reports. The full-text version must be obtained through the official payment channel of the publishing agency or academic databases such as CNKI and Wanfang.

In the past six months, I have helped at least 7 people in different industries find the electronic version of this document, and their needs are quite different: there is an HR from an Internet company who wants to make an EAP (employee assistance plan) plan and ask her boss for budget approval; there is a girl in an operations position who has just worked for two years and feels that she is too tired to talk every day and wants to compare the data to see if she is burnt out; there are also students majoring in sociology in colleges and universities who are looking for research samples for their graduation thesis. To be honest, I have saved several so-called "full blue book resource packages" before. When I opened them, they were either old data from 2019 or 2020, or a hodgepodge of reports from different institutions, and there were even pirated copies with a lot of psychological counselor recruitment advertisements inserted. I really couldn't use them for serious work.

In fact, looking for the electronic version of the Blue Book is like looking for cold medicine. You just want to have a general understanding of the average level of the industry and make some reference for daily status adjustments. It is enough to find free public abstracts. Last week, there was an administrative girl in the HR community who took the public release from the Institute of Psychology. I went to report on the 2024 core data summary released by the company, which happened to include the calculation that "for every 1 yuan increase in employee mental health investment, the company can reduce the loss of resignation and sick leave by 5-8 yuan." The care budget of 120,000 yuan was directly approved without having to find the full copy. If you really want to do academic research and build a company-wide long-term care system, you still have to buy the genuine version from official channels. The academic version of the blue book uses the PHQ-9 depression screening scale, GAD-7 anxiety screening scale, and MBI burnout scale that have been tested for reliability and validity. The survey sample in 2024 alone has 92,000 working people. The data is much more reliable than the fun psychological tests you can find online.

The blue books on the market now have quite different focuses, and no one has a more authoritative statement. The version produced by academic institutions such as the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is more biased toward universal research. It will break down occupational burnout into three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced sense of personal accomplishment for analysis. Data in 2024 shows that 35.8% of working people have moderate or above occupational burnout, and IT, education and training, and medical care rank in the top three. The disadvantage is that the content is too academic, and many expressions are overwhelming to ordinary people, and there are not many practical suggestions. The other type is industry reports produced by human resources service providers such as CIIC and Beisen. Most of them are jointly researched with the companies they serve. There are many specific practical cases in them. For example, a new energy car company allocates 12 free psychological counseling quotas per year to all employees. In one year, the voluntary turnover rate dropped by 8 percentage points. It is very suitable for HR to take it and directly copy the work. The disadvantage is that most of the samples are their paying customers, and the coverage is not as wide as that of academic institutions. It will inevitably be biased towards medium and large enterprises.

As for "how to solve psychological problems in the workplace" that everyone is most concerned about, academic circles and business circles have been arguing for several years without reaching a unified conclusion. There is a group of people who believe that enterprises should bear the main responsibility. As long as they can reduce ineffective overtime, clarify job responsibilities, and not engage in wolf culture PUA, most of the problems can be solved. After all, the data in the blue book also shows that 72% of job burnout is directly related to "unequal power and responsibility" and "meaningless internal friction". The other group believes that individual adjustment has a higher priority. After all, the general environment cannot be changed by ordinary people, and the cost of changing jobs is getting higher and higher. I used to know a girl who was an e-commerce operator. The company could not even guarantee weekends. She made a rule for herself: just go straight to get off work after work. I closed WeChat at work, took 10 minutes a day to do breathing meditation, and joined a "disconnect after get off work" fan group. After half a year, my burnout score dropped from 7 on a 10-point scale to 3, which is much more useful than the inane team building the company does.

Of course, many people think that these blue books are simply useless when talking. I was talking about this with a friend who runs a cultural media company. He said that there are only 20 people in our company, and even social security has just been paid according to actual wages, so we can’t recruit a psychological counselor, right? This is true. For small and micro enterprises, instead of following the blue book to develop a complicated care system, it is better to avoid making mistakes, pay wages on time, and not take up useless meetings during off work time. This can already solve 80% of workplace psychological problems. In fact, many blue books do not mention this. After all, the survey samples are mostly medium and large enterprises, so there are inevitable limitations.

One final word, whether you are looking for this blue book to make plans for your company or to find a reference for your own situation, don’t regard the data in it as a golden rule. After all, the mental health of people in the workplace can never be defined by just a few numbers. Whether you feel comfortable going to work every day and whether you have the energy to cope with life outside of work is more accurate than any survey data. If you really feel that your situation is not right, even if the blue book says that everyone in your industry is like this, you should find a way to adjust and don't force yourself to do it.