This professional experience report presents characteristics of mental suffering experienced by prison security agents (PSAs) and outlines the psychodynamic elements that emerge in prison surveillance work. Based on a space for mental health care delivery to these workers, the following factors were apprehended: the emptiness of the work meaning, the feeling of imprisonment in some functions, the fearfulness about the security and the pejorative social representation of this work. This mental health care allowed the understanding of anxiogenic experiences, the elaboration of the psychodynamic aspects mobilized by institutional demands and it also favored subjective mobilization for coping with institutional disciplinary practices.
Worker’s health; Mental health; Work; Prisons