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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2051 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 8, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I have a gut feeling that mental health is declining in the United States. How would I go about quantifying and gathering data that would provide evidence for/against my gut feeling?

The problem I'm running into is that I don't think the data I need is publicly available. I was thinking I should look at trends in things like:

  • Deaths of despair (drug overdoses, suicides) - this is the easiest data point to gather
  • Percent of population with a mental health diagnosis, with further breakouts by type of diagnosis
  • Number of people currently seeing a mental healthcare provider (per capita)
  • % of total population that ever saw a mental healthcare provider
  • Waitlist times for new clients seeking a mental healthcare provider
  • Percent of population not seeing a mental healthcare provider, but that indicate via survey that they have symptoms of a mental health disorder.

New Matt Yglesias blog post is about this

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I think a good data point for determining if despair is rising would be to look at attempted suicides.

I found a Polish study, it says (based on data from General Police Headquarters of Poland)

In the analyzed age group, an increase in the number of suicide attempts has been observed over a period of 20 years (Figure 1). During recent 5 years, the number has more than doubled—from 428 in 2014 to 905 in 2019

I haven't found good US data but I think this is an interesting angle to explore.

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