Mental Health in the U.S. During the Pandemic
Ok, firstly, some background on the creation of these two graphs. This was a very lengthy process, especially for the first graph, where I imported data from the CDC into Excel and spent over an hour cleaning up the data which included over a dozen columns and thousands of rows, tracking different time periods, ages, different states/regions, the lower and upper confidence intervals, range, and so on. Expanding on this first graph, I decided upon a line graph with 3 lines, one for anxiety, one for depression, and one for those showing either or. Unfortunately, the data only goes back as far as April of 2020, and I wish it started a few months earlier as to show the very beginning of the pandemic, and even a month before hand, like in January of February, as that would be important information in reference to what I'm trying to convey. For the second graph I knew I wanted to include something including some sort of Covid-19 statistic, that was a good reflection of the severity of the pandemic at different points throughout 2020, and the beginning of 2021. I found a large, comprehensive data set from OurWorldinData.org tracking various Covid-19 statistics, and eventually decided upon Daily Deaths due to Covid, which I feel is an accurate portrayal of the pandemic’s severity in our nation over time. After spending a while cleaning up the data, I made the graph and ultimately had to edit it a bit in order for it to better match the first graph, especially in regards to time. I cut off all the data from before March in order to try and match the time/lineage displayed in the first graph, which is unfortunate because it cuts off some relevant information, however even with this the time/lineage between the two graphs doesn’t really link up too well, one starts at the very end of April of 2020 and ends at the beginning of February 2021, while the other starts at the very beginning of March and ends at the end of February 2021.
Anyways, to get into the actual narrative being displayed here; although it is somewhat subtle, the changes and trends shown in the mental health graph is very significant, and aligns with a few trends in the Covid graph. Firstly, it is pretty clear that generally, there is a trend showing that throughout the time span of the pandemic, the percentage of Americans displaying symptoms of anxiety/depression has increased overall. Additionally, it also seems that periods of significant rising and falling in the percentage of Americans with symptoms of anxiety/depression aligns with significant periods of rising and falling Covid-19 deaths; one example is visible in the early Summer, where Covid-19 deaths started to significantly fall, as the first major “wave” of the pandemic seemed to pass, mental health seemed to significantly improve, with a large drop off in the percentage of people showing anxious/depressive symptoms; in another example however, we also see that following the late Summer and Fall, as the pandemic seemed to slowly catch back up and eventually make a significant return, mental health slowly declined, with increased anxiety/depression that peaked analogously with the second major wave of the pandemic, indicated with the peak of Covid deaths in the graph.
Of course, we must remember the golden rule: correlation ≠ causation. Just because the two graphs seem to line up together quite well, we cannot make the conclusion that this is evidence of the severity of the pandemic in the country affecting the population’s mental health. Ultimately, given further analysis, we could deduce that they’re correlated, but with this information alone, nothing beyond that. Moving forwards, I’m definitely going to being tweaking around with this data, possible using other data sets, changing the format and other things, I’ll have to see as things progress.
Anyways, regarding the second part of this HW. I spent a while on Flourish trying to get some graphs to make any sense but I was just really struggling. I’m not sure if you wanted us to use all the countries, so that we could compare the exact display of data, or if we could make it easier and choose just a few countries so that its manageable. I assumed you wanted us to do the former of which, but I just couldn’t manage to make much of anything comprehensive. Here’s two things that I made for example:
Just the sheer number of countries made it incredibly difficult for me to make a comprehensive visual, especially on flourish where I really don’t know what I’m doing.
Anyways, let me know what I could improve for this section and I’ll try and get to doing it.
