Video Transcript: Mental Illness Statistics

Mental Illness Statistics Welcome back to the mental health integration short. I am still Brandon Appelhans and happy to be with you. In the last section, we talked about how mental illnesses—any mental illnesses and severe mental illnesses— and how they impact our ability to react and thrive. In this section, we're going to discuss how often these things occur and what that means for us. So let's go ahead and jump in. Now, this data is courtesy of SAMHSA. All of these percentages are based on the United States, specifically the 2019 data, pre-pandemic. These numbers are not affected by COVID-19. This has nothing to do with the anxiety rates or anything like that that happened after COVID. It is all pre which if we wanted a good measuring stick, that's a pretty good measuring stick to get. This is the National Institute of Mental Health, annual rate of mental illness. So these are when we talked about severe mental illness and we talked about any mental illness. This is the rate force for any mental illness, and this is the rate United States broken up by both gender, age and race. So first off, you'll notice that the overall rate for any mental illness is about 20.6% which is fairly high. One in five people about in the United States will suffer a mental illness, and this is in any given year. These are not lifetime rates. This is just any given year. The lifetime rate for people who will suffer with a mental illness, last I checked, is around 50.3% so it's actually above half, but just barely. Next you'll notice that females are much more likely than males to actually have a mental health condition, about 50% more likely. There have been studies done out of Stanford that have shown when you take workaholism and some other symptoms into effect that affect males often, that sometimes those numbers can even out because they're actually much closer than we give them credit for. Next you'll notice with age, you'll notice that mental health issues are more common in younger people, and then they dwindle off later. Some of this is because anxiety rates are so high, there's been some other studies about various inputs that have changed this, like technology specifically, since I started doing this work, rates of mental health issues have always been higher for younger people than they Were for older people, but it seems like the rates for younger people have been going up at a very accelerated rate. You can also see that by race, race and ethnicity, there are huge disparities in how many, how often people are diagnosed with mental illnesses among certain races, often mental illnesses are viewed as a white person's problem. You can see from the chart that among single race people, white people, have the highest rate of mental illnesses. But you will also notice that the rates are significant, and those gaps have closed significantly with other races and whites, and you'll see that there's other spaces where they're even higher. Right on the right side of the graph is people of two or more races, and their rate of mental illness is one and a half times what it is for whites, which that's just amazing that there's that much of a disparity. The differences between a lot of these may be stigma. It may be because people are afraid of getting diagnosed. It could also be the situation that they're in lends to a different space. But what you should know is the rates for mental illness don't actually reflect the rates for suicide. Specifically suicide is the white people have a slightly higher rate of depression and anxiety and mental illness. They have significantly higher rates of suicide, more than double most other populations, and especially white men, women have more mental illnesses than men, and men commit suicide at a rate of almost four to one to how many women do so. There are some major breakdowns in some of the numbers. The last you'll note that American Indians and Alaskan Natives are at 18.7% and they are the second highest single race or ethnicity group in these graphs. Next we're talking about who received mental health services in the last 12 months. These are of people with mental illnesses. This isn't the general population, and this is, again, the 2019 numbers. According to SAMHSA, you see right here that about 45% of people with mental health issues last year received treatment. That is a really low number. Okay, that's still less than half, and then we see many populations receiving even fewer services than that. Some of this is because of stigma. Some of it is because of access to services, but these numbers are so low. The rates for severe mental illnesses are higher, but it's still so low. Females see professionals about mental health issues more than males, and you also see that the rates where people see someone about their mental health actually goes up as they age. So the rates of mental illness were higher in people who were younger, but the rates of people getting treatment are higher as you get older. We also see that the rate of people who get treatment is much higher with whites than in any other segment, including those of two or more races, and in cases of like Asian Americans, it's more than double. So we see that even if mental illness is construed sometimes as a white person's problem, maybe that's also because white people are also getting the most treatment for whatever reason that treatment is most available, if it's because of stigma or if it's because of access to health care and access to insurance and some things like that. Next I want to show you. This is the prevalence of severe mental illness. We talked about AMIs and SMIs, any mental illness, and severe mental illness, this is the rate of severe mental illness overall. This is about 5.2% of the population. That means that about one in four people who have a mental illness have a severe mental illness. And we see the rates for females is about six and a half versus 4% in males. We see the rates incredibly high for 18 through 25 year olds, compared to 50 plus. And we also see how these variations by race happen again, with whites being fairly high, but actually being exceeded by Native Americans and Native Alaskans. Finally, in the case of people with two or more races, these numbers are staggeringly high, with them being almost double what they are for whites and double the national average at 9.3% it's just for whatever reason, there is so much more mental illness that happens in that space and gets diagnosed. Finally, with serious mental illness, we see that treatment is much more likely to happen with people with severe mental illness than it is with any mental illness. With any mental illness, it was less than 50% of people got treatment overall with severe mental illness. It's almost two thirds, 65.5% female still more likely than males to get that treatment. And we also still see that treatment rise with age, with almost three quarters of people age 50 plus, getting treatment for their mental health conditions. And while we see that there are still disparities in race, those disparities are not as large as they are in any mental illness. So mental illnesses are a really big deal. If you're in a church and you have 100 people in your church you can count on probably 20 of them dealt with a major with a mental illness last year, and probably five of them dealt with a serious mental illness this last year. Those are staggering when often we don't take into consideration the people around us are going through horrible things often. So take into consideration what these numbers mean, how they make a difference, and how few people are getting treatment, and this is in the United States, these numbers worldwide change wildly. So understand that there's a lot of people who need treatment for these things, and that these mental illnesses are, in many cases, much more common than we give them credit for. And I will see you in the next section.