A Shift Seven Years in the Making

In 2018, only 27% of people around the world considered mental health one of the biggest health problems facing their country. It ranked third, sitting quietly behind cancer and chronic disease. By 2025, that number has climbed to 45%, making mental health the number one health concern on the planet, ahead of cancer (41%), stress (31%), and obesity (25%). This is the largest increase recorded for any health issue in the entire history of the Ipsos Health Service Report.

These are the findings of the Ipsos Health Service Report 2025, a 30-country study of more than 23,000 adults, one of the most comprehensive global health surveys in existence. For those of us working in mental health on the African continent, the message is both deeply validating and urgently uncomfortable.

Access to a trusted listener changes outcomes. For millions of people, that access is still out of reach.

Here Is the Nuance That Matters

Before we celebrate, we need to sit with a more uncomfortable truth embedded in the same data. Mental health is not the top concern for everyone. For older generations, specifically Baby Boomers born between 1945 and 1965, cancer remains the number one health problem, cited by 46%. In nine of the 30 countries surveyed, cancer still leads. Mexico is the only country where obesity ranked first, and South Africa is the only one where drug abuse came top.

More importantly, public awareness is one thing. Systemic response is another entirely. The same Ipsos research found that 41% of people globally say their healthcare system still treats physical health as more important than mental health. People believe mental and physical health are equally important, with 76% saying so, but they also know their healthcare systems have not caught up. We have a world where minds are struggling at record rates, and health infrastructure is still looking the other way.

A Generational Divide We Cannot Ignore

The data reveals a striking generational split. Among young people aged 16 to 29, 48% cite mental health as their country’s top health issue, compared to just 35% among adults aged 70 to 74. But the sharpest finding is the gender gap among young people. 55% of Gen Z women name mental health as one of the biggest problems, compared to 37% of their male counterparts. Young women are carrying a disproportionate share of this burden, and the world needs to pay close attention to that.

A majority of Gen Z globally (54%) say they have felt stressed to the point where they could not go to work or school in the past year. For Millennials, that figure is 47%. These are not statistics about weakness. They are signals from a generation that has been asked to carry far too much for far too long.

Community and honest conversation remain among the most powerful mental health interventions we have.

The Hidden Dimension: Mind and Body Are Not Being Treated as Equal

Perhaps the most telling finding in the Ipsos data is the gap between what people believe and how healthcare systems behave. Three in four people worldwide (76%) say mental and physical health are equally important. Yet the same people are more likely to regularly think about their physical health (72%) than their mental wellbeing (60%). And when it comes to healthcare systems, 41% say mental health is still treated as the junior partner.

This is not simply a matter of attitude. It is a structural problem. Mental health services are underfunded, understaffed, and in many countries, especially across Africa, barely exist at the community level. People know they are struggling. They are willing to say so. What they lack is somewhere safe and accessible to go when they do.

Family is still the first place most people turn for mental health support, according to Ipsos data from 31 countries.

What Must Be Done: Seven Actions That Cannot Wait

The Ipsos data does not just tell us where we are. It points clearly to where we need to go. The following areas demand urgent, coordinated action from governments, civil society, health systems, and communities alike.

1. Invest in Community-Level Mental Health Infrastructure Awareness without access is not enough. Governments and health ministries must move beyond awareness campaigns and fund trained community health workers, peer support networks, and accessible first-contact services. The Ipsos data makes it clear: the demand is there, and the system needs to meet it where people actually are.
2. Build Generationally Responsive Services Young people, particularly young women, are the most affected and the least served by traditional health structures. Services must be designed around their realities: digital-first options, school-based support, youth-friendly spaces, and mobile outreach. Older generations need mental health care that is integrated with cancer care and treats the whole person.
3. Close the Gender Gap in Mental Health Access The fact that Gen Z women are nearly 20 percentage points more likely to name mental health as a concern than Gen Z men, yet far less likely to find it normalised in the systems around them, is a call for gender-responsive mental health policy. Men also require specific, culturally sensitive outreach. Social norms around masculinity suppress help-seeking at great personal and social cost.
4. Integrate Mental Health into Primary Healthcare Mental health should not sit in a separate silo. In most low-resource settings, the single point of health contact is the community health worker or a primary clinic. These facilities must be equipped to screen, refer, and offer basic psychosocial support. Training non-specialists in evidence-based interventions is not a compromise. It is a proven, scalable strategy.
5. Take Stress Seriously as a Public Health Crisis Stress ranked third globally at 31%, and it is what drives many of the downstream diagnoses we see in clinical settings: anxiety, depression, burnout, and physical illness. Workplace mental health policies, school-based social emotional learning, and community resilience programmes are not soft interventions. They are preventive investments with measurable returns.
6. Fund Peer Support and Lived Experience-Led Care When people need mental health support, they first turn to family (52%), then friends (38%), and only then to health professionals (21%). This is not a failure of the health system. It is a community asset waiting to be structured. Peer support programmes that build on this natural behaviour are cost-effective, culturally appropriate, and genuinely scalable.
7. Demand Accountability from Health Systems The 41% who say their health system still treats physical health as more important are not wrong. They are describing a real and persistent policy failure. Civil society, advocates, and communities must hold governments to international commitments, including WHO targets for mental health spending, and push for mental health to be included in Universal Health Coverage frameworks with the same weight as non-communicable diseases.

Where This Leaves Us

The Ipsos Health Service Report 2025 offers a paradox: never before have so many people recognised mental health as a crisis, and never before has the gap between recognition and response felt so wide. The world is, at last, saying the right things. What it has not yet done is build the systems, the budgets, and the political will to match its own beliefs.

For those of us on the ground in Kenya and across Africa, this is not an abstraction. It is families navigating grief with no counsellor available. Young people leaving school because of anxiety with no one trained to notice. Men carrying silent burdens until the weight becomes unbearable. Communities that know something must change, and carry the frustration of being asked to hold it all alone.

The data is clear. The direction is known. What remains is the decision to act, and the courage to build something that actually reaches people where they are.

Sources: Ipsos Health Service Report 2025, 30-country survey of 23,172 adults, July to August 2025. Ipsos Health Service Report 2024, 31-country survey of 23,667 adults, July to August 2024. Ipsos World Mental Health Day 2024 Report, 31-country study of 24,668 adults. All data accessed and cited from ipsos.com for editorial and public health awareness purposes.