These two sessions sat really naturally together, both circling the same core idea: seafarer wellbeing isn’t a side topic anymore, it’s central to safety, performance, and retention. Dr Pennie Blackburn took a step back to look at the system as a whole, while Emma MacCarthy zoomed right into daily life onboard. Different angles, but a very consistent message running through both: we already know enough, the challenge is turning that into action that actually lands.
Dr Blackburn opened with some hard-hitting data that sets the context quickly. A 2019 study showed 28% of seafarers screened positive for a diagnosable level of depression, with 20% experiencing anxiety, and 35% saying they had asked no one for help. One of the most significant findings was that the strongest influence on mental health wasn’t just workload or environment, but whether the company felt caring or not. More recent industry figures reinforced the scale of the issue, including fatigue ranking 5th among top illnesses, stress contributing to 6 out of 10 common conditions, and 9% of fatalities onboard linked to suicide.
From there, her focus shifted to why progress feels so slow despite increased awareness since the pandemic. Mental health, she argued, is still too often treated as a “nice to have” rather than something embedded into how organisations actually operate. A key challenge is coordination gaps and initiative fatigue, lots of programmes exist, but they’re often disconnected, inconsistent, or not clearly evidence-based. The result is a lot of activity, but not always a clear sense of impact.
She broke wellbeing work into three clear strands: promotion, prevention, and response. Most of the industry effort currently sits in promotion (campaigns, training, awareness) and response (EAPs, helplines), but she made a strong case that the real opportunity is in prevention, reducing risk before harm happens. Her message was practical rather than abstract: start by understanding your baseline, define what “good” looks like, and then direct resources where they’ll actually move the needle. It doesn’t have to be big or complex, but it does need to be intentional.
That idea of practical, grounded action carried straight into Emma MacCarthy’s session, which focused on what wellbeing actually looks like in day-to-day seafaring life. Fatigue was front and centre. It remains a major safety risk, contributing to around 25% of marine casualties, with 1 in 4 seafarers admitting to falling asleep on watch. Working hours are still extremely high, often 85+ hours per week, and have increased over the past decade. On top of that, 50% of seafarers report not feeling safe because of their working hours, which is a striking signal of how normalised fatigue risk has become.
Emma brought the science of fatigue into a very practical space, particularly around circadian rhythm. Night work directly conflicts with the body’s natural clock, with the highest-risk window between 2am and 5am, when accidents are more likely to occur. From there, she highlighted simple but surprisingly effective interventions: improving sleep conditions with blinds or eye masks, managing light exposure by encouraging natural light at the start of shifts, and being mindful of “sleep inertia”, that foggy, impaired state after being suddenly woken, which can seriously affect judgement.
The session also widened out beyond fatigue into the broader lived experience onboard. Small environmental and social factors matter more than they’re often given credit for, food quality, cultural familiarity, and small morale boosts all play into how people feel day to day. Even something as simple as shared treats or moments of comfort can have an outsized impact over time. And while digital connectivity has improved, the real message here was that wellbeing depends on both external connection and strong internal relationships onboard, supported by a consistent, trusted point of contact.
Taken together, both sessions landed on the same conclusion from different directions. At a system level, seafarer wellbeing needs clearer strategy, stronger prevention focus, and better alignment between what’s being done and what actually works. At a practical level, it’s about the accumulation of small, real-world changes that reduce fatigue, improve recovery, and make life onboard feel more human. One big picture, one day-to-day reality, and both pointing in the same direction.