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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2318 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.

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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.

See if there were any large cohort surveys done across the decades with questions like “would you say you are happy with your life”, “how often do you think about killing yourself”, “do you consider your life to have purpose”, “do you look forward to the future”, “how often do you feel gratitude”

IMO you can’t do “deaths of despair” because Americans have more cheap distractions now than ever, which is certainly preventing some from suicide. You can’t do mental health diagnosis because criteria changes and because of availability differences.

I found https://www.samhsa.gov/data/nsduh/national-releases there is a number in each years report like this:

Among adults aged 18 or older in 2021, 22.8% (or 57.8 million people) had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year.

In 2021, 5.5% of adults aged 18 or older (or 14.1 million people) had serious mental illness (SMI) in the past year.

I think this will be a decent way to see the trend. It is self-reported but there would be some consistency due to some of the same respondents self-reporting over multiple years.

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