Present conditions and problems of applying autogenic training to promote mental health in the workplace

Mental health of workers in Japan has become one of the most serious health problems in the workplace. To tackle this problem, the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare set guidelines for promoting mental health of workers in 2000, in which every worker was recommended to learn autogenic training (AT) from the standpoint of “self-care”. Before the guidelines, however, some healthcare professionals had already advocated that AT should be utilized as a relaxation method to help workers cope with stress. Although knowledge about AT has spread among occupational healthcare staffs since then, there are only a small number of companies whose employees regularly practice AT. In order to overcome difficulties, we need to solve problems such as how to motivate workers without any health problems to learn AT, and how to effectively teach them the AT. In this report, we explain our activities to find solutions to these problems, which include studying what conditions are characteristic of companies whose employees have kept practicing AT, and developing a new method of teaching AT by correspondence.