The 2026 Q1 report, drawn from 1,000 working adults surveyed between late February and early March, puts the average mental health score at 56.9. It's a modest uptick of 1.4 points from the previous quarter, and that small movement tells us something important: we don't climb out of this all at once.
The cost of staying unsupported
When we look at what's actually standing between a person and the help they need, the picture sharpens. Forty-five percent of workers point to financial burden. Twenty-six percent say they feel uncomfortable sharing their situation. Twenty-one percent don't know what kind of support would actually fit. Nineteen percent worry about how others will see them. Fifteen percent simply don't know where to begin.
Notice how layered this is. The obstacle isn't a single wall — it's a stack, with money at the bottom, then stigma, then the quiet confusion of not knowing which door to walk through. That's why so many of us feel stuck even when programs technically exist. The gap between "available" and "reachable" is where we tend to lose ourselves.
What the numbers quietly reveal
Here's where the data gets uncomfortable in the most useful way. Workers who cited cost as a barrier scored 14 points lower on the mental health index than those who faced no barriers, and lost roughly 12 additional workdays a year to reduced productivity. Those who said they simply lacked the means to seek help posted the lowest scores of any group, with 26 more lost productivity days annually.
Read that again. The people most in need of support are the ones our systems are least designed to reach. Older workers, those 50 and up, were about twice as likely to report no barriers compared with workers under 40 — which suggests that experience, tenure, or accumulated workplace relationships are quietly buffering access in ways younger employees don't yet have.
Kang Min-jae, who leads TELUS Health's Korea operations, put it plainly: even when support programs exist, employees aren't using them because of financial pressure and lingering negative perceptions. Investing in mental health support, he added, isn't a soft expense — it's how organizations protect the output they actually depend on. Forty-one percent of workers wanted coverage extended to family members, and twenty percent simply wanted stronger mental health support from their employer — small signals that the appetite for care is already there.
What we do with this
So if you're the one sitting with the symptoms, and the cost of a therapist feels like another weight on top of everything else, you're not failing at self-care. You're hitting a structural problem that millions of others are hitting alongside you. That distinction matters, because internalizing a structural barrier as a personal shortcoming is how we lose another few points on a score we don't even know we're being measured by.
A small, anchored practice to try this week: before you decide whether professional help is "worth it financially," write down what one session would cost you in concrete money, then write down what one lost workday of focus, sleep, or patience is already costing you. Hold both numbers in the same hand. Notice which one feels heavier. That noticing is the first cognitive reframe — it moves us from "I can't afford to get help" toward "I can't afford to keep absorbing this without help."
We don't need to solve the whole system before we can ask for one appointment. We just need to stop treating being stuck as a personality flaw when it's actually a price tag.