Official statistics rarely deliver a verdict as blunt as the one now coming out of Brazil's social security system. When a national insurer, drawing on medical certification, records the number of people signed off work for mental illness climbing by tens of thousands a year, the figure has left the realm of individual misfortune. It has become a description of working conditions. And in Latin America the numbers arrive with an unusual twist that sharpens rather than softens the diagnosis.
An administrative record, not an opinion survey
ANAMT (2026), using official INSS data for medical leaves longer than fifteen days, found mental-health absences in Brazil rising from 219,850 in 2023 to 367,909 in 2024 and 393,670 through November 2025, an increase of roughly 79 percent over the 2023 total. The detail inside the trend is stark. Anxiety leaves nearly doubled, from 81,874 to 157,235. Cases coded as burnout tripled, from 1,760 to 6,985. The benefits paid crossed 954 million reais in 2024, and the Southeast, led by Sao Paulo, accounts for more than half the cases.
Because this is administrative data resting on medical certification, not a self-report survey, it is hard to explain away as a mood or a reporting artifact. People are being clinically signed off in rising numbers. The scale points past any story about individual fragility toward something structural in how work is organized and paced.
Thriving people, draining jobs
What makes the Latin American case genuinely revealing is the contrast running through the region's own wellbeing data. Gallup (2026), in its regional figures for Latin America and the Caribbean, reported that 56 percent of workers are thriving in life, the highest level in over a decade, and that regional wellbeing sits among the highest globally. Yet engagement in the region stood at just 30 percent. Life is going comparatively well; work is not landing.
That gap is the whole argument in miniature. If people can be thriving in their lives while disengaged at their jobs, and while clinical absence for mental illness climbs, then the workplace is the variable pulling in the wrong direction. You cannot pin rising work-related mental-health leave on a population that is, by its own account, doing better than it has in years outside of work. The common factor between the disengagement and the sick leave is the job itself.
The structural backdrop
None of this sits in a vacuum. The regional labor market carries strains that make sustainable work harder to build. The ILO (2025), in its 2025 labour overview for Latin America and the Caribbean, reported that informality still affects around 47 percent of the employed, close to one in two workers, a figure that barely improved on 2024 and that the organization treats as structural. Informal work tends to mean less protection, less predictability, and fewer of the guardrails that make a humane pace possible. It is a macro condition, not a measure of self-management, but it shapes the terrain on which any wellbeing effort has to operate, and it falls hardest on women and the young.
Against that backdrop, the Brazilian leave numbers read less as a sudden crisis and more as the visible surface of pressures that have been building underneath a labor market where protection is uneven to begin with.
It is worth being precise about what the leave figures do and do not prove. Rising diagnoses partly reflect reduced stigma and better recognition: some of the increase is people finally seeking care they would once have suffered in silence, which is progress, not only decline. But the magnitude resists a purely benign reading. A near-doubling of anxiety leaves and a tripling of burnout cases in two years, ANAMT (2026) reports, is too steep and too concentrated in working-age adults to be explained by awareness alone. And the coding of burnout specifically, an occupational syndrome by definition, ties the trend directly to conditions of work rather than to life in general.
The regional contrast sharpens the point. If the problem were general malaise, wellbeing across Latin America would be falling too. Instead Gallup (2026) finds thriving at its highest in over a decade even as engagement stalls at 30 percent and clinical leave climbs. Something specific to the workplace is diverging from the broader trajectory of people's lives.
What the numbers ask of employers
The temptation, faced with data like this, is to respond at the level of the individual: more counseling lines, more resilience content, more encouragement to seek help. Those have their place, and the rising diagnoses partly reflect people finally seeking care. But if thriving lives coexist with draining jobs, as Gallup (2026) shows, the leverage is at work, not in the worker.
For employers in Brazil and across the region, the ANAMT (2026) figures are best read as a design brief. They mark, in the hardest currency available, the cost of a pace and a set of demands that people cannot sustain. The organizations that treat the sick-leave trend as a signal about their own operating model, rather than a story about individual employees who need to toughen up, are the ones reading the data correctly. The numbers are telling on the workplace. The question is whether anyone in charge is willing to hear the accusation.
Sources
- ANAMT (2026). INSS data on mental-health leaves in Brazil. Absences rose about 79 percent since 2023 with burnout tripling and costs above 954 million reais in 2024, an administrative record pointing to working conditions. https://www.anamt.org.br/portal/2026/01/27/levantamento-anamt-com-dados-oficiais-do-inss-revela-crescimento-dos-afastamentos-decorrentes-de-problemas-de-saude-mental-entre-2023-e-2025/
- Gallup (2026). State of the Global Workplace, regional data for Latin America. 56 percent of workers thriving against just 30 percent engaged, showing the gap between good lives and draining jobs. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/697850/state-of-the-global-workplace-regional-data.aspx
- ILO (2025). 2025 Labour Overview of Latin America and the Caribbean. Informality near 47 percent frames the structural terrain on which regional wellbeing efforts operate. https://www.ilo.org/publications/2025-labour-overview-latin-america-and-caribbean