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Andy Wright joined us to discuss the results of the 2022 Mentally Healthy Survey and see what we can do better to push our industry forward.
This article is sponsored by our friends at Streamtime.
The third Mentally Healthy survey set out to measure the mental health and wellbeing of the media, marketing and creative industry in Australia and New Zealand. The biennial survey was conducted by Never Not Creative and UnLtd and supported by the Mentally-Healthy Change Group and follows the surveys conducted in 2018 and 2020 that identified that our industry was 20% more likely to experience signs of depression than the general public. The survey measures the levels of depression, anxiety and stress using the standard DASS scale but also dwells deeper into areas that impact mental wellbeing at workplace.
“Whilst the depression and anxiety levels remain high in our industry, the last results showed a reduction of stigma around mental health. Over the last four years we’ve seen employers make a real effort to address mental health. Mental wellbeing is now much more normalised a topic than when the survey first started in 2018. Now in the last few years, we’ve had external issues like the pandemic to deal with on top of the systemic industry issues that were already there. We use the results to drive our initiatives and work in this space, so we’re more intrigued than ever to uncover this year’s results and help our industry further.” — Andy Wright.
The purpose of this third study was to evaluate what had changed since 2020 and to gain a deeper understanding into the state of our mental health in the media and creative industry. The survey included more than 1,300 employees across the media (57%) and creative (27%) industry. Of these, 32% were male, 67% female and 1% non-binary/other term.
AT A GLANCE: OUR INDUSTRY’S MENTAL HEALTH – 2022
“One of the most promising findings from this latest wave of research was that our mental well-being seemed to have improved. The Mentally-Healthy study uses the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) to measure anxiety, depression, and stress levels. For the first time since we started this mission into understanding mental health, we found that just under half of respondents showed mild to Extremely severe signs of anxiety and depression. In the previous two waves, this was more than half. We still see approximately a third of respondents displaying moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety and depression, but these symptoms are now more moderate than severe.” – NNC 2022 Mentally Healthy Survey Results
“We conducted a regression analysis to investigate whether any groups faired better or worse. For the first time, we found a gap opening up between media agencies and creative agencies. People in creative agencies were almost twice as likely to show moderate to severe symptoms of depression vs media agencies. We had looked for this difference in previous studies, but that was never observed. It accompanied a hypothesis that there may be a difference between the agency and client sides. While some minor differences can be seen, none can be said to be significant, like the one between creative and media agencies.” – NNC 2022 Mentally Healthy Survey Results
Read the full results of the 2022 Mentally Healthy Survey here.
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