Almost all Americans, regardless of their age, colour, generation, or background, agree that the country is experiencing a mental health crisis.
According to a recent survey by AWN and the Kaiser Family Foundation, 90% of Americans believe that this issue is a national emergency, and 50% of adults report having witnessed a serious mental health crisis in their family.
In collaboration with KFF, AWN released a number of stories this week that were based on the survey. Here you may read the main report. And check out this explanation of the survey’s methodology from the polling team at AWN.
Brenda Goodman of AWN focused on how parents are unsure of how to care for their children’s mental health in America.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, chief medical correspondent for AWN, and senior producer Amanda Sealy visited Durham, North Carolina, to observe how communities are altering their 911 call responses and employing mental health specialists.
There is also 988, a three-digit number that anyone in need of assistance can contact, but according to the report, not many people are aware of it.
I emailed Ashley Kirzinger, the director of survey technique at KFF, to discuss what we discovered from the research and to get a more comprehensive look at the poll’s results. Here is our talk.
90% of Americans have few common ground.
WHAT COUNTS: 90% of Americans think there is a mental health problem in the US, which is such a startling headline. What topics are 90% of Americans in agreement on? Can we formally state that these results indicate a shift as well? Are more people now claiming that there is a mental health crisis in the US?
You are entirely correct; typically, we discuss how divided the nation is, and it’s uncommon to find a statistic on which such a sizable majority of folks agree. Despite the fact that we lack a prior comparison question with the exact same phrasing, we are able to infer that there has been a shift in people’s experiences over the past few years from other data points. For instance, during the epidemic, the proportion of adults reporting symptoms of sadness or anxiety has quadrupled in federal survey data. Additionally, data from the CDC (US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) has showed that both drug overdose mortality and suicide rates have increased. The pandemic didn’t start all of these patterns, and some of them have gotten worse. These additional data pieces, in my opinion, serve to explain why such a sizable majority now considers the current state to be a mental health catastrophe. People are witnessing the struggles of their friends, family members, neighbours, and occasionally even themselves. It makes sense that nine out of ten people believe that the US is experiencing a crisis given that more than half of all individuals report that they or a family member had gone through a severe mental health crisis.
an initiative that was born out of the epidemic
WHAT MATTERS: What motivated AWN and KFF to embark on this task? What did you see that convinced you that it was worthwhile to do this?
KIRZINGER: Polling from KFF and AWN during the Covid-19 epidemic showed that there were more worries about adults’ and children’s mental health in the US, both in terms of the impact the pandemic had on people’s mental health and the difficulties faced by those seeking mental health. Stress and anxiety related to job losses, childcare for working parents, family members becoming ill or dying from Covid-19, and other situations are just a few instances. Beginning in March 2020, we discovered that approximately half of adults said that stress and fear from the epidemic were negatively affecting their mental health. Additionally, significantly higher percentages of other categories, like parents and young adults, had a negative influence. All of this sparked interest in performing a study that was purely dedicated to mental health, with some emphasis given to the groups who we know were most negatively impacted by the pandemic.
Pandemic and daily life
HOWEVER, the epidemic is not a recurring pattern in the findings. How come?
In reality, for many Americans, the epidemic is now in the background as they deal with the typical strains of daily life, whereas when we started this study, it was mostly focused on the special difficulties of the pandemic. However, the worries and anxieties that surfaced during the epidemic haven’t subsided, so individuals are juggling returning to work, enrolling their children in school, and dealing with many of the mental health issues that have emerged over the previous two years. Despite the fact that the survey’s questions aren’t specifically related to the pandemic, I believe that people’s responses reflect their experiences and concerns from the previous two years.
