Mental Health: Global Snapshot on Anxiety, Stress, Substance Use

Mental Health: Global Snapshot on Anxiety, Stress, Substance Use

by Deleted user -
Number of replies: 2

I write about adolescence and youth a considerable amount and the eco-anxiety alone with teens feeling helpless and hopeless from adult missteps on policy and practices worldwide so it's worth investigating further

Though WHO had great info on ages 10-19 w/fact sheets: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-mental-health I chose to focus on the larger "World Data" charts to deconstruct the data viz by topic to see how "at a glance" we could discern patterns...Bar graphs quickly depicted anxiety as being most prevalent but it would've been nice to have an age breakout generationally to improve and note patterns.

I liked the scatterplot use of color, size of dot and regional side menus to enhance and refine mental health disorders by gender and country: https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health

Interactives that allow people to engage/mouse over areas of interest always impart deeper dives with personal data I think, though they did a good job using basic color mapping globally to assign percentages of depression for example, too. In short, I think "Our World In Data.org" encompassed every map, plot, chart mechanism we studied in one fell swoop, so it was fun to take one over-arching topic and see it layered into different ways of imparting the info. Now can we do one specific to youth age 10-19? ;) 



In reply to Deleted user

Re: Mental Health: Global Snapshot on Anxiety, Stress, Substance Use

by Linda Morland -

Thank you for sharing these resources. As a retired psychiatrist nurse I am always interested in current data giving worldwide comparisons. Mental Health - Our World in Data was very useful in looking at the breakout of diagnoses. Of course stigma plays a large role in under reporting as does political outlook. I would question how accurate stats from China or North Korea might be. 

In reply to Linda Morland

Re: Mental Health: Global Snapshot on Anxiety, Stress, Substance Use

by Deleted user -

Linda, I agree...grain of salt in those regimes. (In fact, only thing I could find on ancillary lens with this was the 'shaming' inclination on suicidal tendencies which kept those regions silenced/stuffed and 'in check' statistically/sociologically) This No. Korea vs So. Korea mental health PTSD lens on exposure to violence shows the leakage/damage of same when it comes to conflict and health: https://conflictandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13031-019-0230-0 

And in the US (quite unique in its lack of gun control traumas) I'd like to see data visualization on the impact of policies on youth, given the climate change and gun violence 'inevitability/positioning' which is a psychological driver for despair (especially among kids/non-voting age youth subjected to adult actions over which they have ZERO control)