Anxiety, depression. Everyone has heard of mental health issues, whether from personal experience or through media. In the richest country of the world, however, Americans tend to shy away from the topic that many of the population struggle with on a daily basis, according to data.
In a CNN/Kaiser poll from 2023, 90% of Americans agreed that the United States is in a mental health crisis. Data has shown that the problem has only gotten stronger during and after the pandemic, too. Mental health is across the news landscape every day, whether readers realize it or not, from the response to homeless individuals in New York City, to initiatives made to try to curb trends like high childhood suicide rates. But Americans in particular know more friends and family with depression than the world average, yet have the one of the lowest comfortability rates in talking about the topic.
Bernice Pescosolido, an sociologist researcher at Indiana University Bloomington and director of the Irsay Institute, first had interest in the topic of stigma when she realized that no one had done research on it since 1950. "It's very hard to get these studies funded because everybody wants change, but I think they're like shooting in the dark," Pescosolido said. "So we've sort of made it our mission here at the Irsay Institute, really to be the national monitor of stigma."
In the United States, a study by the Wellcome Health Monitor in 2020 showed only 7.2% of Americans felt very comfortable talking about mental health issues. The world average was 23.3%. Despite many feeling uncomfortable with the topic, the study also showed that 48.1% of Americans knew friends and family with anxiety or depression– above the global average of 38.8%.
One of the biggest correlations Pescosolido mentioned was relationships with those with mental health issues, and how that experience turned out. "If you know somebody with a mental illness and they're very close to you and the relationship survived, it has a really good effect on stigma," she said. "But if you have a relationship with somebody with mental illness not so close and certainly if it didn't go well, it actually increases it."
Although there is not a one-size-fits-all answer to the large discrepancy, there does seem to be a generational shift of normalizing mental health issues, leading to less stigma. In a small study held by Uppsala University in Sweden, 32 interviews with young people showed that shift. Results showed that mental health problems are becoming the new normal, due to current living conditions, and that "lack of knowledge was suggested as a source of prejudice against people suffering from mental health problems."
"I think we just need to be more sophisticated about how we think if we want to make change, [and] what the nature of that contact would be," Pescosolido said. "In general, I think we're a very frightened society at the moment."
The github to this story's data can be found at: https://github.com/amethystmart/mental_health