Mental Health
Good mental health is essential to a person’s wellbeing. It affects our ability to adapt to change, cope with challenges, live productively, and have healthy relationships. Mental disorders are conditions characterized by alternations in thinking, mood, perception, and/or behavior (Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, 2018). Mental illness collectively refers to all diagnosable mental disorders including, but not limited to: • Anxiety disorders (e.g., generalized anxiety disorder, phobias) • Mood disorders (e.g., major depression, bipolar disorder) • Psychotic disorders (e.g., schizophrenic spectrum and other psychotic disorders) • Behavior disorders (e.g., ADHD, conduct disorder) • Personality disorders (e.g., borderline or antisocial personality disorders) • Substance-related and addictive disorders (e.g., alcohol and other substance use disorders) (SAMHSA, 2019) The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) provides several measures related to mental health: the percentage of adults 18 and older reporting any mental illness in the past year, serious mental illness in the past year, at least one major depressive episode in the past year, and any serious thoughts of suicide in the past year. The visualizations below show NSDUH data for the U.S. and Indiana overall and by age group.
Depressive Episode
Suicidal Thoughts
The Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) provides one measure of past year mental health for the U.S. adult population 18 years of age and older: 14 or more bad mental health days in the past 30 days. The visualization below shows bad mental health days for the U.S. and Indiana overall and by age group, education level, gender, and race/ethnicity. Bad Mental Health Days
Information on the mental health of high school students in grades 9 through 12 is available from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). The YRBSS provides information on the percentage of 9th through 12th grades reporting the following: feeling sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks, seriously considering attempting suicide, making a plan about how they would attempt suicide, making a suicide attempt, and making a suicide attempt that resulted in injury, poisoning, or overdose that had to be treated by a doctor or nurse. The following visualizations below show YRBSS data for the U.S. and Indiana overall and by gender, grade level, and race/ethnicity.
Seriously considering attempting suicide
Suicide Mortality
Data on suicide mortality is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Underlying Cause of Death data file available at https://wonder.cdc.gov. The visualizations below provide a graph of the age-adjusted suicide mortality rate for Indiana and the U.S. and the same information by gender, race, ethnicity, and age group. The map provides pooled, age-adjusted suicide mortality estimates for Indiana by county for the years 1999-2017.