One in three women in Finland born in 1997 had received at least one form of mental health-related support by the age of 28, according to a new analysis by Kela, with the figures showing a marked difference between women and men in the use of sickness allowance and rehabilitative psychotherapy.
The analysis followed more than 57,000 people born in Finland in 1997 from age 16 through the end of 2025. Among women, 33.9 per cent had received mental health-related sickness allowance, a disability pension or rehabilitative psychotherapy during the period. Among men, the corresponding figure was 15.3 per cent.
Kela said the analysis is believed to be the first in Finland to examine the use of these forms of support across an entire birth cohort, allowing researchers to follow how the use of services and benefits developed from adolescence into early adulthood.
Mental health-related sickness allowance was the most commonly used form of support. About one in four women in the cohort had received it by age 28, compared with 12 per cent of men.
The gap was even wider in the use of rehabilitative psychotherapy, a form of treatment supported by Kela. Around 16 per cent of women had received the support, meaning roughly one in six, while the proportion among men was below 4 per cent.
For those who received rehabilitative psychotherapy, sickness absence was also common. Half of the people who had received the psychotherapy had previously or subsequently received mental health-related sickness allowance.
The scale of psychotherapy use among young women was one of the findings that drew particular attention from Kela’s head of research Miika Vuori. He said the figures also raise questions about why the difference between women and men is so pronounced.
” What stands out in particular is how common the use of rehabilitative psychotherapy was among young women. At the same time, the large gap compared with men raises questions,” Vuori said.
The pattern was different when researchers looked at disability pensions. By age 28, 3.5 per cent of women and 3.4 per cent of men in the cohort had received either a temporary or permanent disability pension. Unlike sickness allowance and rehabilitative psychotherapy, there was therefore almost no difference between the sexes.
The reasons recorded for disability pensions, however, differed considerably. Among male recipients, an intellectual disability or neurodevelopmental diagnosis was part of the grounds for the pension in 62 per cent of cases. The corresponding figure among female recipients was 37 per cent.
Kela’s definition of mental health in its disability pension statistics is broader than the term might suggest. The category includes not only mental health conditions but also neurodevelopmental conditions and intellectual disabilities.
That distinction is important when interpreting the figures. The analysis measures people’s use of specific benefits and services rather than attempting to establish how many people in the cohort had a mental health condition.
“Official registers measure the use of benefits and services, not mental health or mental health problems directly,” Vuori said.
The study covered more than 28,000 women and 29,000 men born in Finland in 1997 who were alive and living in the country when the follow-up period began. By examining the same group over more than a decade, the analysis provides a picture of how reliance on publicly supported mental health-related services and benefits can develop during the transition from school years into adulthood.
The findings also leave questions that the benefit data alone cannot answer. Kela said further research is needed to understand how support needs among young women and men are recognised, why patterns of service use differ, and how schools, workplaces and other environments respond when young people need help.
The figures therefore show a clear difference in the use of mental health-related support between women and men in this particular 1997 birth cohort, but they do not, on their own, explain what lies behind that difference. Understanding that gap will require looking beyond benefit records to how mental health difficulties are identified, treated and supported during adolescence and early adulthood.
