Women accounted for roughly 63% of workplace leaves granted for mental health disorders in Brazil in 2025, according to data from the Ministry of Social Security. Of the more than 559,000 benefits awarded for these reasons, 353,000 went to female workers.
Speaking to Live CNN on Friday, Dorli Kamkhagi, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Pontifical Catholic University of Sao Paulo (PUC-SP) and works with the Institute of Psychiatry at the Hospital das Clinicas of the University of Sao Paulo (USP), said the higher rate of mental illness among women has deep sociocultural roots.
Kamkhagi said there is an entire culture, an entire psycho-emotional history, that means a girl is viewed differently from the moment she is born. She said women are conditioned from an early age to take on the role of caregiver, whether for the home, children or elderly parents, piling those responsibilities on top of professional demands.
Kamkhagi identified guilt as one of the most common emotional factors driving the problem, describing a sense of guilt and an awareness of not being good enough. She said this constant feeling of owing something is present in women across all social classes and feeds directly into burnout, depression and anxiety. Women from every social background live through the same thing, she said, drawing on decades of clinical and hospital work.
The scale of the problem has grown sharply. About 188,000 people took mental health related leave in 2021. By 2025 that figure had jumped to 559,000, a 198% increase in five years. Leave among men in 2025 totalled 206,000 cases, a significant gap compared with women.
Lack of structural support
Kamkhagi said the situation is made worse for single mothers in Brazil, since exhaustion tends to intensify when the responsibility for raising children falls solely on the mother.
Without proper intervention, whether through psychotherapy or support centres, she warned that this pattern develops into prolonged leave with high costs to the social security system and to society, saying it leads to enormous social security spending and spending on work leave.
She also pointed to the vulnerability of adolescents, who face violence, bullying and pressure from social media. Kamkhagi said public policy needs to address women starting from pregnancy and continuing through childhood and adolescence, adding that any serious thinking about the policies that need to be made has to start in childhood.
Delays in care
Data from the Ministry of Health show that work related mental disorders among women rose 14 percentage points over a decade, climbing from 58% in 2014 to 72% in 2024. Against that backdrop, waiting times for treatment in Brazil's public health system were flagged as a critical obstacle.
Kamkhagi said a woman should not have to wait months until she suffers a breakdown and has suicidal thoughts, adding that she was struck by the number of cases involving suicidal ideation and called it terrifying.
She acknowledged positive initiatives already exist, such as the Psychosocial Care Centres known as CAPS, but argued they need to be expanded. She also said Brazil needs more quality daycare centres so that mothers can work or care for other family members without accumulating distress.
Kamkhagi concluded that the women who hold families together and who help the country in an enormous way need to, and must, demand these rights.
