Trends of Mental Health in the US During the Pandemic
First let’s start with some context. At first glance it often may seem that even before the Covid-19 Pandemic, mental health has been on the decline, especially among youth. These two graphs depicting Anxiety and Depression over recent history would support that idea.
However, we have to realize that the country’s population is constantly growing, and thus so is it’s number of people with anxiety/depression. So… it seems better to look at such data proportionate to the population as a percentage. Below we see that the prevalence of Anxiety and Depressive Disorders appears to have actually changed very little, no significant increase or decrease.
If you’ve seen my previous medium post on these, I already talk about a lot of the similarities in trends, connecting the dots between increases between the two graphs, and explaining its correlation over causality, so I’m not really going to extend on that. However, I want to sort of finish this off with saying that ultimately (as I’m writing this after already doing the midterm) all of this is to say that linking trends between exactly how impacts of different points of the pandemic over the course of 2020 and the beginning of this year is incredibly tricky and not really something that I feel I’ll be able to convey efficiently with differently visualized data. I feel like the main lesson I’m learning here is that instead of trying to set a specific idea in stone and trying to find data that supports it, often it’s better to try and read/follow the narrative that the data already makes obvious and I guess that’s what I stuck with as you can see with my ultimate approach with the midterm.
(something I found interesting, sort of unrelated in specifics to my points above)
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