Finland Gave Two Groups Identical Payments. One Experienced 33% Better Mental Health.

There’s a revolution happening in mental health treatment, and it’s not coming from pharmaceutical companies or therapy offices. It’s coming from something far simpler and, in retrospect, far more obvious: giving people monthly unconditional income.

A new analysis of Finland’s basic income experiment has just added another brick to what is becoming an undeniable wall of evidence. In the groundbreaking experiment, two groups of unemployed people received an identical amount of money with identical regularity—€560 per month. The only difference was how they received it. One group got it unconditionally, with no strings attached. The other group got it conditionally, with requirements to look for work, report to unemployment offices, and satisfy bureaucrats. And the money went away with employment.

Same money. Different rules. The results?

In the control group receiving conditional benefits at the end of the trial, 24% had poor mental health. In the treatment group receiving unconditional basic income, only 16% had poor mental health. That’s an 8 percentage point reduction—a full 33% less poor mental health—simply from removing the conditions.

Let that sink in. It wasn’t the amount of money that made the difference. Both groups got the same €560 a month. It was the unconditionality itself—the simple act of trusting people with resources, without surveillance or judgment, without hoops to jump through or forms to fill out—that created these dramatic improvements in psychological well-being.

This new analysis, published in December 2025 by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and the University of Helsinki, confirms what basic income advocates have long suspected: the conditions we attach to welfare aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences. They are active harms. They create stress, anxiety, and psychological damage that persists even when the financial support is adequate.