Gen Z and Mental Health Messaging: What the Data Shows

This week we’re taking a closer look at the final finding from the Ramp Pulse: Mental Health Communications in Canada, our survey of 8,516 Canadians on how mental health messaging reaches people in daily life.

A quarter of Gen Z say they don’t come across mental health messaging in their daily lives. At 25.8%, that’s roughly in line with the national average of 27.0%, and close to Millennials (23.5%) and Gen X (25.0%). 

Gen Z are about as unreached as every other generation, which runs counter to assumptions about younger Canadians and digital mental health content.

Where Gen Z does diverge is on trust.

We asked Canadians what would most influence whether they trust a mental health resource. Across every generation, a doctor or healthcare provider referral came first. Except Gen Z.

For Gen Z, endorsement from a recognized health or medical organization ranked highest at 22.2%. Doctor or healthcare provider referral came second at 18.8%, the lowest doctor-referral figure of any generation we surveyed.

That’s a meaningful distinction. Institutional endorsement, an organization’s reputation, its affiliations, its credibility as a body, matters more to Gen Z than a direct clinical referral. The authority they’re responding to is organizational, not individual.

What we think this means

This finding sits alongside the clinical trust trap we wrote about earlier this week. Across every generation, Canadians find clinical or expert-backed tone the second-last credible format in mental health messaging. For Gen Z specifically, even the trust pathway looks different: they’re the only generation where organizational endorsement outranks doctor referral.

For communicators, this points to a few considerations:

• Organizational credibility may carry more weight than individual clinical authority for Gen Z. The reputation, affiliations, and endorsements of the organization behind the resource matter, and should probably be more visible in how the resource is communicated.
• Lived experience still plays a role. Personal stories and voices from people who’ve been through it ranked highest for credibility across every generation in our survey, including Gen Z. The question is whether both organizational credibility and lived experience are present and visible in how communications are built.

The data also raises a question we couldn’t answer from this survey: why does Gen Z weigh organizational endorsement differently? Is it skepticism of individual authority? Greater familiarity with organizational brands in digital spaces? We don’t know yet, and it’s one of the threads we’re planning to pull on when we return to sample.

This is the last in our series of posts taking a closer look at findings from the Ramp Pulse: Mental Health Communications in Canada. The full data is available for download.

If you’d like to talk through what these findings mean for your organization, we’d be glad to. Book a consultation with Ramp.