Over a quarter of Canadians Say they Aren’t Encountering Mental Health Messaging at All

This week we’re taking a closer look at one 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.

Over a quarter (27%) of Canadians say they don’t come across mental health messaging at all. That was the largest single response to the first question in our survey, larger than any preference for a particular tone or format.

The number holds across every generation. Baby Boomers are the most unreached at 33.9%, notably higher than Gen Z (25.8%), Millennials (23.5%), and Gen X (25.0%). The gap cuts across every generation. 

Among the unreached group, the challenge goes deeper than channel or format. When we asked what would influence whether they trust a mental health resource, 44.0% said none of the options we offered would move them. Things like doctor referral, peer recommendation, free and private access, organizational endorsement, and input from people with lived experience. For this group, none of it applies.

What we think this means

This points to a communications problem, and a difficult one, because the usual starting points don’t apply. Organizations refining their existing channels or tweaking their tone are working on a different problem entirely. This group isn’t in contact with the messaging to begin with.

What’s less clear is why. Is it that mental health messaging isn’t present in the environments they occupy? Is it that they’ve encountered it and disengaged to the point of not registering it? The data surfaces the gap but doesn’t explain it, which is part of why we’re planning to return to this group through further research with Caddle. We want to understand what it would take to reach them before we start making recommendations.

For communicators, the data points to an uncomfortable question: your audience may be smaller than your metrics suggest. Reach isn’t the same as encounter, and encounter isn’t the same as impact.

This is the first in a series of posts taking a closer look at findings from the Ramp Pulse: Mental Health Communications in Canada. In the coming days we’ll dig into the clinical trust trap and what the data tells us about Gen Z specifically.

Download the full Ramp Pulse report here.

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