Health
as some covid pressures ease, anxiety and depression rates remain high
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by ELISABETH GAWTHROP | May 26, 2023
May is mental health awareness month, and several of APM Research Lab’s recent stories have included sections with mental health data analysis. Here is a compilation of that coverage.
From this week’s COVID in Minnesota newsletter and story for MPR News:
This week, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning about the mental health effects of social media, particularly among young people.
While social media can provide benefits, such as finding communities of support, being more connected with friends and serving as a creative outlet, there are risks as well. Children aged 12-15 who spent more than three hours per day on social media had double the risk of poor mental health, according to recent research cited by the surgeon general’s report. That amount of social media usage is not uncommon — in fact, the average for teenagers according to another recent study was 3.5 hours of social media usage per day.
Specific causes of mental health effects from social media use include perpetuating body dissatisfaction and amplifying social comparisons, especially among girls. Hate-based content is another cause.
The report follows another recent report related to mental health from the surgeon general, which focused on what he termed an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That report mentions that while social media and technology can provide much-needed resources in some ways — such as online support groups — the harm comes from when it displaces in-person engagement, monopolizes our attention and reduces the quality of interactions.
Research has found, for example, that using phones during face-to-face interactions between parents and children, and between family and friends, led to more distraction, worse quality of conversation and less enjoyment of the time spent together.
So just how anxious and depressed are young people in the U.S., and Minnesota specifically? Our analysis of recent data from the U.S. Census Household Pulse Survey shows a solid of trend of increasing anxiety and depression as age decreases.
The data doesn’t include people under 18, who this week’s surgeon general’s report focused on, but for 18-24 year-olds, the numbers are striking. Transgender people in that age group had the highest rates of anxiety and depression among all of the age and gender groups, at 78 percent. Young women had the next highest, at 56 percent. Within each age group, women have higher rates of anxiety and depression than men, and transgender people reported much higher rates than women or men.
The same general trends hold true in Minnesota too, although the sample size of Minnesota transgender people was too small to include in our analysis. Women in the 18-24 age group had an anxiety or depression rate of 52 percent, which is more than eight times the group with the lowest rate — 6.4 percent for men aged 75 and up.
If you’re a parent or caregiver of children, the surgeon general’s report offers a few suggestions:
- establish tech-free zones in your house to better foster in-person relationships
- teach kids about responsible online behavior
- model responsible online behavior
- report problematic content and activity
From this month’s Color of Coronavirus report:
We analyzed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey to get a sense of the pandemic’s toll on mental health across racial and ethnic groups, in combination with gender identities.
The Household Pulse Survey includes gender identity categories of male, female and transgender. The survey’s race and ethnicity data does not include Pacific Islander or Indigenous categories; people in those two groups are presumably grouped with the multiracial/other category. We used the method outlined by the CDC to identify the number of people who reported symptoms consistent with major anxiety and/or depressive disorder.
Given those definitions, transgender people across all racial and ethnic groups had the highest rates of anxiety and/or depression over the last year. Within each racial and ethnic group, women had higher rates of anxiety and/or depression than men. Among non-transgender people, women who are multiracial or of another race than those listed had the highest rates of anxiety and/or depression, followed by Hispanic women. Asian men had the lowest rates of anxiety and/or depression.
For MPR News earlier this month:
The pandemic years have taken a toll on the mental health of Americans. In light of May being mental health awareness month, we decided to revisit the pandemic-era mental health survey data we first reported on back in October. This data comes from the Household Pulse Survey, conducted periodically by the U.S. Census Bureau since the start of the pandemic.
The good news is that what might have looked like the beginning of an upward trend in anxiety and depression levels in our last coverage on this topic did not manifest. Rates of anxiety and depression have gone down slightly since a peak in the fall, and they remain below the highest levels seen in 2020 and early 2021. However, they are still well above where they were before the pandemic.
In the most recent poll, from early April, around 28 percent of Americans reported symptoms of anxiety, which is 3.5 times the share who reported such symptoms before the pandemic. The recent rate is 11 percent lower than the relative peak seen last fall, and similar to rates recorded between the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022.
While rates of anxiety have dropped since earlier in the pandemic, they are still far higher than pre-pandemic.
Around 21 percent of Americans reported symptoms of depression in the latest poll, which is 3.2 times the pre-pandemic rate. The recent rate is 16 percent lower than the relative peak seen last fall and is nearly tied with the rates recorded in spring and summer of 2021, which were the lowest rates of depression since the pandemic began.
While rates of depression have dropped since earlier in the pandemic, they are still far higher than pre-pandemic.
The trends are similar for Minnesotans — a slight decrease in reported rates of anxiety and depression compared to last fall, but still elevated.
In the fall, we reported that Minnesota had some of the lowest rates of anxiety and depression in the country. For this week’s update, we averaged the data just since our last report in October.
Over that more recent time, Minnesota has the lowest rates of anxiety and/or depression in the country, with an average of 27.4 percent. South Dakota and Wisconsin have the next lowest levels, while Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Louisiana and Kentucky have the highest rates of anxiety and depression.