Working Conditions and Mental Health in a Brazilian University

The highest prevalence of mental illnesses and mental suffering in contemporary society has raised awareness of the theme and their connection to work. In Brazil, university servants (professors and technical-administrative staff) are a focused occupational group. We developed this research with the objective of exploring the relationship between the perception of working conditions and the mental health of these servants. Structured questionnaires were applied to 285 servants, 33.5% being professors and 66.5% technical-administrative staff. Regarding working conditions, the questionnaires included items that measured 15 primary factors and questions about their contracts and legal conditions. To evaluate mental health, the participants answered a questionnaire about common psychic symptoms, negative and positive affects, self-esteem, and family-work conflict. We composed groups of participants according to their mental health indicator scores (cluster analysis), and after that, we compared the mean scores in working conditions for the groups. Then, we found that the mean scores of 13 from the 15 working condition factors were significantly different between the mental health groups. Our results showed the importance of improving working conditions in universities to prevent mental illnesses. Understanding the content of each working condition factor presents potency to contribute to defining the priorities among different aspects of working conditions.