The Global Mental Health Crisis: All You Need To Know

I've read that we have a mental health crisis when I say we I don't mean that physicists are depressed because they still don't understand quantum mechanics though that's that I mean we on this planet supposedly have a mental health crisis they if you take a closer look at the headlines most of them seem to be about the United States so do we really have a global Mental Health crisis or is it an American thing or is it maybe not a thing at all does it have something to do with covet and if not then what's going on that's what we'll talk about today I've had many career plans in my life but becoming a YouTuber wasn't one of them the learning curve has been steep to say the least and it hasn't always been easy I'm still learning new things but it's become so much easier thanks to skillshare who have been sponsoring this video skillshare is a community of creative and curious people who will share their skills it's an amazing resource because one of the biggest challenges that I faced with what I would like to call a non-traditional career is finding useful advice whether you want to know how to effectively use social media or grow a YouTube channel how to be consistently creative or manage your time the skillshare community is there to help I've been struggling for some time with the feeling that everything I do sucks so I found it really helpful to learn more about the psychology behind our inner critic with the class creative Confidence from Lucy lambre it's allowed me to deal with the problem more consciously and look at it with a little bit of self-humor if you want to explore your own creative and career options Be Your Own Boss or get some freelance tips skillshare is the best place to start and of course we have a special offer for viewers of this channel the first 1000 people to use our custom link in the info below we get a one month free trial so go and check this out let's jump right in and see what the data say the global burden of disease is a web interface maintained at the University of Washington in Seattle it should not be confused with the local burden of disease which is more commonly known as kindergarten this web interface collects and lets you display Health Data from all over the world at the moment it covers the years from 1990 to 2019 so it ends before covet to get an idea for what was going on before the pandemic we can search this database for mental disorders that are a cause of death and injury globally and here we get the result this is the incidence rate that is cases per 100 000 people as you can see it's been pretty much stable over the past decades don't get confused by this axis it doesn't start at zero we can change this here as you can see the line is pretty much flat okay there's no Mental Health crisis thanks for watching wait I have to talk at least for eight minutes otherwise I can't put an app break in the middle luckily there's a few more things to say let's look at this data a little closer first of all the lines are flat not because there's been an increase in some regions and a decrease in others the level of mental health problems has been almost flat in all regions of the world the most pronounced restaurants you can see are that in Latin America there's been a mild increase and in North America there's been a rather noticeable increase in the late 1990s that however tapered off if you look at a closer breakdown you see that this happened in the United States whereas in Canada at the same time that was actually a dip the reason this increase in mental health problems in the USA and Latin America barely shows up in the global average is that compared to Asia the total number of people isn't all that high another interesting thing you learned from this database is that the higher the income level the lower the mental health must be tough to be a billionaire also why the prevalence of mental health problems is somewhat higher among women the difference to men is not large according to a study that appeared last year the most common mental health disorders among both men and women are depressive disorders and anxiety disorders however among women eating disorders are more common whereas ADHD and autism spectrum disorders are more common among men you might say that maybe looking at causes of death and injury is a bit narrow as there is more to mental health than physical damage and I'd agree but looking at documented damage circumvents the problem that especially in the Western World diagnosis and treatment of mental health conditions has become more widespread and the cases on record might increase because of that rather than because of changes in mental health for example the number of people on antidepressants in the European Union has steadily increased in the past decades which this website claims is a sign of a mental health crisis turns out that the European country with the largest per capita consumption of antidepressants is Iceland I guess sitting on a volcanic island that scratches on the Arctic Circle isn't for everyone but the overall reason for the increase in antidepressant use is probably not so much that people in Europe are actually getting more depressed it's just that depression is increasingly recognized as an illness and that more medications are available to treat it also as we saw in an earlier video the prevalence of conditions like ADHD and autism spectrum disorder has sharply risen because of better screening screening for depression has also increased in the past 10 years especially in the US and funding for mental health studies has increased too on top of that mental health conditions are much more openly discussed today than they were 30 years ago and this might also create the impression that they're becoming more common still this doesn't mean it's all good one way to see that something odd is indeed going on in the United States is to look at suicide rates they were on the rise there already in pre-pandemic times whereas they've been dropping in Europe actually they've been dropping in most of the world but it's not just the US where suicides are on the rise in Brazil too things aren't going all that well okay but all of this was before covet what happened during and after the pandemic a meta review from last year found that during the covet pandemic suicide rates did not exceed expectations from pre-pandemic times in 33 countries for which there was Data available when it comes to mental health problems in general according to a fairly recent study the world made it through the covet pandemic reasonably well this one is a meta-analysis of 103 37 studies that compiled General mental health anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms assessed right before covet and up until April 2022 the authors didn't find changes for General mental health or anxiety symptoms but depression symptoms worsened just a tiny bit they conclude that rather than a mental health crisis at a population level there's been a high level of resilience during covid-19 and changes in general mental health anxiety symptoms and depression symptoms have been minimal to small with no changes detected in most analyzes what they mean is that while many studies found significant mental health impacts at the beginning of the pandemic by mid-2022 most people had bounced back to their previous level of mental health at least those who were still alive however this study averaged over the entire globe and all age groups and that doesn't tell the whole story according to a series of surveys conducted by the analysis firm Gallup the incidence of depression in the United States has increased with the onset of the covet pandemic and it still hasn't returned to pre-pandemic levels the U.S Census Bureau has also kept track of depression and anxiety before during and after the pandemic and reports the same while levels have been dropping since the height of the pandemic they're still elevated in this figure the green 9 is the pre-pandemic level from 2019. if you look somewhat closer at the details it becomes apparent that this isn't a general American thing but affects young people in particular and it isn't a new trend earlier this year the Center for Disease Control in the United States released the annual perspective report for 2022 and 2021 so that's data from right at the onset of the pandemic they found that the suicide rate for adults in their early 20s was the highest in more than 50 years but this trend was apparent in the data already before the pandemic reports of depression among young people in the United States have also significantly risen in the past decade the covet pandemic didn't help it isn't an exclusively American phenomenon also in the UK the number of children referred to Mental Health Specialists has increased in the past decade or more the same has been seen in several other countries for example Australia and New Zealand though in those countries the increase luckily doesn't reflect in an increase in suicides keep in mind that one has to interpret numbers for referrals and diagnosis with some caution because they might have more to do with the treatment and general acceptance of mental health disorders rather than their actual prevalence the depression Trend affects Young Americans of both genders but girls are more affected earlier this year the CDC released a trend report showing this gender gap for high school students while girls have always reported more mental health problems the Gap has been widening there's also been an increase in suicide attempts though luckily not a huge one the largest increase in suicide rates in the U.S has been in the age groups of 20 to 24 and 25 to 34. something is clearly going on but what there is no one-size-fits-all answer since every country has its own challenges for example remember the puzzling increase of suicide rates in Brazil according to a 2022 review most of the cases are either unmarried men or people with mental health disorders suicide rates among them are strongly associated with unemployment and economic deprivation what's with the United States in a paper from 2022 a group of neuroscientists from the United States and Spain considered the opioid epidemic as a possible explanation on the one hand opioid overdoses in the United States have increased exponentially in tandem with suicide rates since approximately 1999. on the other hand the largest increase in suicides is among young adults and those are actually less likely to use opioids so if the two are related it's an indirect cause one could speculate that maybe young people are affected by the problems of their parents generation but there's no evidence for that another factor that has been considered to explain what's happening in the United States is access to guns but firearm ownership has actually seen a mildly decreasing Trend over the past decades so it seems unlikely to be a course for an increase in mental health problems another possible cause is the failure of the health system according to Mitch Princeton the chief science officer of the American Psychological Association one factor in Rising suicide rates in younger age groups is the remarkable weakening of our mental health response system as he said in an interview with the New York Times though this doesn't explain why it affects young people in particular climate change is also a potential cause of psychological problems both directly and indirectly for one thing that's because climate change increases the risk of people to be exposed to extreme weather events such as floods or droughts which understandably causes distress and then there's the general problem of living in a world that's going to hell in a hunt basket it would make sense that this affects younger people more than older ones because they are the ones who have to sort out this mess psychologists have reported a number of climate-related mental health conditions which go by names such as climate change anxiety environmental distress or ecological grief however it seems implausible that these will have a big impact in the United States in particular and less so in other parts of the world I mean it's not like Americans are all that well known for the environmental Consciousness and then there's the American psychologist Jonathan height who notes that the increase in mental health problems coincides with the popularization of smartphones and social media now a correlation is not a causation but it isn't hard to see how social media that rewards uses for being popular and Visually attractive can be a source of distress especially for young people and especially for girls this argument isn't generally accepted among psychologists though some Studies have found a link between social media use and mental health problems others have not and as we saw in our earlier episode on the good and bad of social media it isn't all that clear which way the causation goes maybe young people with mental health problems are more likely to use social media rather than the other way around be that as it may the U.S Congress is in the process of passing laws that regulate the use of social media for children and adolescents okay so do we have a mental health crisis well some of us do there's been a significant increase in suicide rates among young adults in the United States for the past decade mental health is deteriorating generally among young people in the United States and some other countries too and is a specialty affects teenage girls there might be several reasons for this but one issue that has attracted psychologists attention is the increased use of social media there's a lot of research on that which I have a personal interest in because I have two children who will soon get their first smartphones so if you want us to look closer into the link between social media use and mental health of young people please let us know in the comments many thanks to our supporters on patreon especially those of you in tier 4 and higher this channel would not be possible without your help you can also support us by joining our channel here on YouTube by using the join button below and we're now also on substack at sciencewtg.substack.com I hope to see you there thanks for watching see you next week

Channel: Sabine Hossenfelder

Views: 321,132

Keywords: science without the gobbledygoook, hossenfelder, Mental Health, Mental Health Crisis, quizwithit, Do we have a mental health crisis, global mental health crisis, is the mental health crisis real, mental health USA

Id: ahxqScHSQQY

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023