This study came from something I lived before I studied it. When I arrived in Portugal to do my PhD, I spent months doing work far outside my field, the kind of work that any newly arrived immigrant without recognized credentials ends up doing while waiting for the institutional processes to catch up. I was a psychologist navigating a country that kept asking me to prove myself in ways that had little to do with competence and everything to do with where I was from.
I was surrounded by others in similar positions: overqualified, underpaid, and entirely dependent on one another for navigation, referrals, emotional support, and the practical knowledge that doesn't appear in any official guide. When I began thinking about who gets exposed to psychosocial risk at work and why, I kept coming back to that period. The title of the paper comes from something a participant said in an interview. It captures something the data confirmed consistently: what institutions fail to provide, people build for themselves.