What Happened:
In an interview with HR for Breakfast, clinical psychologist Dr Jo Burrell shared findings from her 2026 HR Mental Wellbeing Report. Across three years of data and nearly 3,000 HR professionals, 44% meet the clinical threshold for depression, around 78% report significant burnout symptoms, and only 13% feel well supported at work.
The people who manage everyone else's wellbeing are faring far worse than the workforce they serve. Burrell puts clinical depression and anxiety among HR at roughly two and a half times the national rate, and says the crisis stays hidden because the most overloaded people are often the ones who still look like they are coping.
The single biggest protective factor in her data is support. HR professionals who feel supported are dramatically less likely to be depressed, anxious, burned out, off sick, or planning to leave, which makes getting support for HR itself the move that changes outcomes.
More Insight:
Burrell spent most of her career as a clinical psychologist, where she kept seeing patients whose anxiety and depression traced back to their jobs. So she started taking that work into companies directly, through training and coaching.
For years HR teams were the ones who hired her to support everyone else, and around the pandemic that changed, with HR professionals coming to her for help of their own, asking for coaching and for sessions on how they could look after themselves.
When she looked for data on their own mental health, she found almost none, so she ran her own survey using clinical measures. Three years in, the picture is steady and stark: a workforce carrying depression and anxiety well above the rate seen across the wider population, while just 13% feel supported in the job of supporting everyone else.
What struck her most was how invisible it all was. "This was such a big problem, and yet such a hidden problem too," she said. Part of the reason is that capability masks it: the calm, dependable HR person who absorbs the grievances, the redundancies, and the emotional fallout is the one everyone assumes is fine.
By the time strain becomes visible, it has usually been there a long time, which is why so much HR burnout never gets named.
The data also points to what changes the odds. HR professionals who feel well supported are markedly less likely to be depressed, anxious, burned out, off sick, or thinking about quitting the profession.
Her biggest piece of advice is to find connection. Decades of research tie strong social ties to better mental health, and Burrell pushes HR to talk to other HR people specifically, because comparing notes has a normalizing effect that reminds you a hard reaction to hard circumstances is normal. HR spends its days drawing that out of everyone else and rarely turns it inward.
The people who hold the organization together are the least likely to be held themselves, and the profession told to simply be more resilient is the one the data says most needs support. Burrell's bet is that naming the crisis out loud is the first step toward closing the gap.