Brain capital: on the attack!

This is a study from February 2022 which remains a question mark for companies: having interviewed 994 French full-time or part-time employees who have not changed companies since January 2020, the Capterra platform (reviews and software platform) reveals that one in two French people consider that they do not have good mental health in the workplace.

It is certain that a company with such a large proportion of employees in poor mental health must not succeed in being at the top level of performance.

Some will look for causes and solutions in the management of companies. Yes, those nasty and bad bosses who drive their collaborators crazy.

But the phenomenon does not seem to be specific to a few companies, but according to studies and surveys, it affects the whole of society. So there are also perhaps deeper causes to detect.

To solve the problem, one also thinks, of course, of doctors and medicines. The businesses that have rushed into the niche are legion. Mental health is the largest item of health insurance expenditure in France, and in 2020 represented 23.3 billion euros in reimbursements, with boxes of antidepressants filling medicine cabinets.

Doctolib published another study last June which showed that consultations with psychiatrists increased by 32% in 2021, while those with psychologists exploded from 2.97 million in 2020 to more than 6 million in 2021. And it continues in 2022, since during of the first quarter, the number of searches on the platform to find a psychologist jumped 69% year-on-year.

It works well, too, for so-called personal development books, as well as yoga classes, alternative medicine, meditation workshops. We even find smartphone apps, such as “Petit Bambou” (but there are apparently at least 500,000 in the same slot). This has created a new business that offers “certifications” of the safety and quality of these applications (such as Dekra).

Another business, that of things to drink and eat (yes, we can say that there is something to drink and eat) to take care of your mental health: relaxing CBD infusions, capsules of all kinds to improve the capacities of our brain . Even at Monoprix Where Franprix.

We will necessarily have to sort through all these initiatives. The good news is that this creates a breeding ground for innovation and the creativity of entrepreneurs. And it’s not just charlatans, fortunately.

Science and technology also combine to find the solutions to preserve and even increase what is now called the ” brain capital » (brain capital). Because in the face of the challenges and aggressions that our brains undergo (information overload, anxiety, depression, fake newsand even eco-anxiety now, that is to say this anxiety of the end of the world in the face of global warming and environmental changes), specialists in “brain capital” are looking for the right solutions.

Robotization and the influence of the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution are not unrelated to this either: the jobs most threatened by automation and robotization necessarily create this type of anxiety.

It is within this framework that the OECD launched this year an initiative : the Neuroscience-Inspired Policy Initiative (NIPI), to support the development of projects on this subject of brain capital. The next step is the establishment, since July 2022, of an International Alliance for Brain Capital, to mobilize various organizations.

This is why the preservation and development of brain capital must hold the attention of entrepreneurs, businesses and public authorities. A world competition in this field has already begun.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution will still surprise us. It is up to us to prepare for it so as not to lose this cerebral capital.

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