The mental health crisis at work may be partly a crisis of how we count it
Seventy-nine per cent of employees in Singapore are stressed, according to the Cigna Healthcare International Health Study 2025, with the cost of living cited as the primary source by 53 per cent. Thirty-six per cent of employees remain at high mental health risk, according to the TELUS Mental Health Barometer 2025 - barely changed from 39 per cent in 2022. One in two reports feeling exhausted.
As HRD reported on Singapore workers feeling under-supported on mental health, the top three sources of workplace stress are heavy workloads (33 per cent), poor leadership (33 per cent) and tight deadlines (31 per cent). Yet 55 per cent of Singapore employees used no mental health tools or resources in the past year. Investment in EAPs and wellbeing programmes has increased. Utilisation has not kept pace.
But last week, John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times's chief data reporter, published an analysis this week that asks whether these headline figures are actually measuring what employers think they are measuring.
What the data actually shows
Working across UK, US and international data, Burn-Murdoch found that the share of young people reporting a mental health problem has risen steeply over the past decade. The share who say a mental health condition limits their day-to-day functioning has barely moved. In England, a peer-reviewed study by Christoph Henking and Ben Baumberg Geiger found that while there has been a steep rise in the share of young Britons reporting a mental illness, the share saying a mental health problem limits their day-to-day functioning has barely budged.
When young people were asked whether someone experiencing "broad happiness but occasional moments of worry, frustration or loss of confidence" has a mental illness, more than half now say yes. A generation ago, one in five said the same. Older people's views have not changed. Younger people appear to be classifying a bad day at the office as a mental health problem.
The rise in reported mental health problems is also significantly higher among those who identify as politically left-leaning than right-leaning - but that gap disappears when the same question is asked about physical health. The divergence is not about underlying health. It is about how different groups conceptualise and label experience.
This does not mean younger workers are fine. Hospitalisations for self-harm among teenage girls and young women climbed sharply through the 2010s across multiple countries - a concrete signal that does not depend on self-report. That is real distress at the severe end of the spectrum. The question for employers is whether that acute phenomenon and the broader wave of reported workplace mental health problems are the same thing.
The Singapore picture
Singapore employers are the least likely in ASEAN to actively hire people with mental health conditions - only 29 per cent of HR leaders say their organisations do so - even as 89 per cent report having inclusive hiring policies. The gap between stated policy and actual practice is wider in Singapore than anywhere else in the region.
If employers are simultaneously reporting high rates of inclusive mental health policy and low rates of actually employing people with mental health conditions, the label "mental health condition" is functioning differently in practice than in policy. What organisations say about mental health and what they do about it remain substantially disconnected.
The Cigna data adds a further complication. Singapore employees are generally happier with their benefits than counterparts elsewhere in Asia-Pacific - yet 79 per cent report being stressed. The stress is predominantly external: cost of living, financial uncertainty, global instability. That is not a benefits design problem. It is a cost-of-living problem that no EAP can resolve.
Theodoric Chew, Co-Founder and CEO of Intellect, made the point plainly in comments reported by HCAMag: "An Employee Assistance Programme is not the be-all and end-all. These benefits need to be reinforced by strong leadership, supportive policies, and a culture that prioritises wellbeing." The research that identified 55 per cent of Singapore employees as non-users of mental health tools also found that employees place more value on internal factors - leadership quality, flexibility, team support - than on external clinical provision.
The labelling problem
The "strawberry generation" framing - the East Asian concept of a youth generation that "bruises easily" - has circulated in Singapore workplaces for years, typically as a way of dismissing younger workers' concerns. The Burn-Murdoch analysis suggests neither dismissal nor uncritical acceptance is the right response.
Younger workers in Singapore, as elsewhere, are more likely to describe difficulty in clinical terms than their predecessors were. Whether this reflects genuine deterioration, reduced stigma enabling more honest reporting, or a cultural shift in how inner experience is categorised is a question the current data cannot cleanly resolve.
As HRD reported on Singapore employers being urged to rethink benefits for Gen Z, work-life balance has overtaken salary as Singapore's top employer value proposition for the third consecutive year - a shift spanning every generation from Gen Z to Gen X. Yet as Dr Wang Jiunwen of the Singapore University of Social Sciences noted, the most common employer misreading is assuming that flexibility equals balance. Where workloads remain excessive, flexibility relocates the burden rather than reducing it.
The leading stress sources in Singapore's own data - heavy workloads, poor leadership, tight deadlines - are operational conditions, not clinical disorders. The system that has grown up around them - EAPs, wellbeing programmes, mental health days - addresses the symptom rather than the cause.
What follows
The Burn-Murdoch analysis does not argue that workplace mental health is a fiction. It argues that imprecise measurement is hampering the ability to direct resources where they will make the most difference.
If a significant portion of reported mental health difficulty reflects a cultural labelling shift rather than a clinical condition - and the Singapore data on low utilisation of available resources is consistent with that reading - then more clinical provision will not close the gap. More than half of Singapore employees who do not use employer mental health resources report they simply did not know the provision was available. The investment is not failing because it is insufficient. It is failing to reach the people it is designed to serve because the cultural and managerial conditions around it have not changed.
That is a management problem, not a clinical one. And it does not require a bigger EAP budget to solve.
