Never Not Creative launches Mentally Healthy 2026 industry survey
The industry’s longest-running mental health study opens today – shorter, sharper, and reframed around a bigger question: not just what’s going wrong, but what it takes for creative people to do the best work of their lives. Alongside the questions the industry has started avoiding: Is AI making us anxious? Are we tiring of the mental health conversation? And do leaders really know how their people are doing?
Never Not Creative has today launched Mentally Healthy 2026, the fifth wave of the creative, media and marketing industry’s benchmark mental health research since 2018. Thousands of people have participated in the biannual studies since 2018. The last wave surfaced findings the industry couldn’t ignore: 36% of respondents showed signs of moderate to extremely severe anxiety — roughly two and a half to three times what population norms would predict — 38% had been diagnosed with a mental illness, and 70% had experienced burnout in the previous 12 months.
But the 2024 wave also found something more hopeful, and it has shaped everything about this year’s study: when a business was seen to genuinely put its people first, signs of moderate to severe anxiety and depression roughly halved. True flexibility, letting people choose where and how they work, correlated with the lowest anxiety and depression of any working arrangement. The evidence keeps pointing the same way: mental health isn’t the reward for great work. It’s the raw material.
What’s new in 2026?
This wave keeps its longitudinal spine intact — the same validated measures, word for word, that have tracked the industry since 2018 — while breaking new ground in four areas:
Creative identity and pride. For the first time, the study measures the dynamic that makes this industry unlike any other: our wellbeing is tied to the work itself. When does pride in the work protect us and power us — and what happens when work we love is killed, changed or ignored?
AI and mental wellbeing. Building directly on Never Not Creative’s 2025 Never Not Human study, which found AI had intensified feelings of job insecurity, Wave 5 asks the same questions again at ten times the scale, and crosses them against mental health outcomes for the first time. Including a question few have asked: have you felt pressured to use AI, and by whom? Intriguingly, the 2025 study found people who had NOT experienced burnout were more likely to use AI daily, with everything moving so fast, this wave will test whether that holds.
Straight talk. The survey directly measures whether the industry is growing tired of the mental health conversation, including the views people hold but rarely say out loud, with a question leaders answer anonymously about what they privately think.
The leader perception gap. Leaders consistently say they’d notice if someone on their team was struggling. Employees will answer the mirror-image question. We’ll track how those two pictures match — and whether the support businesses invest in is the support their people actually need.
The survey has also been independently reviewed, with new questions on disability and suicide prevention training developed with specialist guidance. Despite the new ground, it is shorter than the 2024 wave.
Says Andy Wright, Founder, Never Not Creative: “We’re not doing this research to catalogue misery. The most important thing the 2024 data told us is that this is solvable. When businesses genuinely put people first, signs of anxiety and depression roughly halve. That’s not a wellness perk, that’s a performance strategy. The best work in our industry has always come from people who feel safe, trusted and backed. So this year we’re asking a more ambitious question: not just where it hurts, but what it takes to thrive.”
The survey takes approximately 30 minutes and is open to anyone working in the creative, media and marketing industries (including digital, comms and PR) across Australia, New Zealand, the UK, US and Canada and beyond. All responses are anonymous, and results will be presented publicly.
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