“It was like a candle fading off”: intervention with bank clerks after a suicide

Abstract

This article is about a health and work intervention of a group of bank workers, from an internal sector of a bank located in Porto Alegre-Rio Grande do Sul.  The demand came from the Bank Workers Union from Porto Alegre and Region after a suicide took place in the work place in 2012. With the initial objective of helping the workers from the sector to elaborate on the trauma and suffering that came with the death, and trying to keep the psychological trauma away, at the same time tried to elaborate on the causes that lead the worker to commit suicide, collective interviews were taken that provided subsidies that allowed to assess the work organization of the workers from that sector. For this objective, issues that were related to the suicide at work were studied, observing important factors of the field of bank work, this field being one that suffered most with the restructuring changes of production in the last two decades. The collective interviews, in a group format, were coordinated by members of the Work Psychodynamic Laboratory (LPdT/UFRGS) and composed by the bank workers willing to participate voluntarily of the meetings. Moreover, it was made available to all workers of the sector the Self Report Questionnaire (SRQ-20). This study made evident the need to propose a way to call for attention the situations that make the worker sick from bank work, as well as an effective work in the process of function delineation that are often not well delineated and can generate other forms of suffering/sickness many times invisible to the new ways of managing. It is also important to point out the need to propose strategies that prevent work sickness resulting from the indiscriminate changes in the banking sector.