On the occasion of this year’s World Mental Health Day, SAFETY4SEA is pleased to announce the launch of ‘SEAFiT’, a new service that aims to ensure that mental health & well-being becomes a global priority for all maritime stakeholders.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global crisis for mental health; according to WHO estimates, both anxiety and depressive disorders rose at more than 25% during the first year of the pandemic. The pandemic disrupted the normal flow of all business operations and especially in the maritime industry, it highly impacted seafarers who were either stranded onboard for months, feeling isolated or unable to join ships and uncertain about the future. At the same time, office staff had to adopt to a new reality that gave rise to stress, uncertainty and other negative feelings.
Albeit the challenges, industry proved that it is a resilient and adaptive to changes business sector as it successfully kept the trade floating. However, pandemic challenged many aspects of mental health, putting at the same time, our wellbeing in the spotlight.
In that regard, SAFETY4SEA’s new mental health program, SEAFiT [ https://seafit.safety4sea.com/ ] provides comprehensive guidance to ship organizations to evaluate the mental health state of both their shore and sea staff and raise mental health awareness across their organizations, ensuring that mental health policies are in place and that their corporate culture aligns with wellbeing needs.
SEAFiT is a powerful tool for maritime organizations which need assistance in addressing mental wellbeing needs and communicate them successfully across all levels. Step by step, this new program can facilitate stakeholders to ensure their office staff and seafarers are mentally strong and able to deal with challenges. Through consulting, assessment, certified training, awareness campaigns and psychological support for crew and office staff, SEAFiT aims to motivate the whole organization to change its mindset around health and wellbeing.
This holistic approach manages to eradicate the stigma around mental health as it successfully encourages all corporate levels to get involved and be empathetic, nonjudgmental and aware of their feelings, both positive and negative ones.
It’s ok not to be ok. With our new program, we aim to exculpate all people, both ashore and onshore, from believing that negative feelings should be not present. As human beings who we are currently facing many challenges, it is normal to feel that we cannot handle everything. We all face difficult situations; our focus should be on how we react. SEAFiT can help organizations react in an empathetic way to people who struggle.
Mr. Apostolos Belokas, Managing Editor, SAFETY4SEA said.
Under SEAFiT program, we provide many different services, practical tools, support and a holistic approach to normalize mental health and assist stakeholders embed it into the organizational culture
… he further explained.
Whilst the pandemic has, and continues to, take its toll on our mental health, the ability to reconnect through the SEAFiT program, will provide to maritime stakeholders with an opportunity to re-kindle their efforts to protect and improve mental health.
