Prevalence of Any Mental Illness (AMI)
Figure 1 shows the past year prevalence of AMI among U.S. adults.
In 2022, there were an estimated 59.3 million adults aged 18 or older in the United States with AMI. This number represented 23.1% of all U.S. adults.
The observed prevalence of AMI was higher among females (26.4%) than males (19.7%).
Young adults aged 18-25 years had the highest prevalence of AMI (36.2%) compared to adults aged 26-49 years (29.4%) and aged 50 and older (13.9%).
The prevalence of AMI was highest among the adults reporting two or more races (35.2%), followed by White adults (24.6%). The prevalence of AMI was lowest among Asian adults (16.8%).
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Everything is so fucking expensive. Groceries, petrol, home ownership, rent etc.
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The planet is gonna burn. Climate change is wreaking havoc on us, and there are people like dumpy and the tories who want to make it even worse.
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There are 3T animals a year that are being killed for food/textiles, and it’s only getting worse.
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We’re also in one of the largest mass extinction events in history
There are so many reasons why people are becoming mentally ill. I could go on but you get the gist. Life sucks :/
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i think it is mainly the identification and acceptance of mental illnesses.
maybe partially because people are realising the world is controlled by rich disgusting criminals.
maybe partially because people are realising the world is controlled by rich disgusting criminals.
Maybe people need to read some history books.
you mean the ones published by the rich and disgusting criminals?
sadly the systemic issues so many people thought were bullshit are very real. people need to read work from actual historians and not a collation of what they want us to believe.
not to say there arent any good history books, their are certainly plenty. McGraw hill however has wormed its way into nearly every american school and millions of peoples minds and wallets.
i know you likely werent referring to those history books, but i feel its something that everyone who read needs to be aware of.
Yeah, my point was that the world has mostly always been controlled by the rich disgusting criminals and people who are just now realizing this need to be aware of that. It’s comparable in my opinion to people posting on youtube videos something like “this Elvis fellow was criminally underrated.” Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean it’s new to everyone.
Back on topic, I firmly believe that social media is causing a lot of these mental health issues. People seem to believe that they are the main character for one, and they have an unhealthy obsession with trying to keep up with other people, while ignoring the fact that what people put online is highly edited and parsed. That’s just my theory as an observer from outside. I have no social media accounts other than this one, and if this all was powered off tomorrow I wouldn’t care.
i agree, the worst being shorts/tiktoks/reels. it absolutely kills your attention span and leads you to crave instant hits of dopamine. i see people watching reels etc. while the tv is playing a show that they are “watching” it drives me insane.
most social media is also meant to make you more lonely and depressed because you are more likely to use them when you are.
people compare themselves to the idealistic characters they see on social media and see that it is something they will never live up to, not realising that they arent supposed to.
there are obviously many complicated reasons and theories like inequality, idealism, manipulation, and the advancements that we have made in mental health that contribute to the issue. ive attempted to condense the topics into a word or sentence but as most of us know they are much deeper and more ambiguous than that.
This and social media. Everything that was bad for humans in media before is on hyper-speed and our identities and egos are more closely tied to our digital presence than ever before.
Collective hopelessness
I mean I think that part of it is the loss of connection in the digital age.
The improved quality of diagnosis.
I also think that we may be misdiagnosing people who aren’t able to have the resources to survive as depressed. Like “huh you’re sad all the time and constantly stressed, gotta be depression and not that you have to work 2 jobs to live in a shithole and be one car accident from losing your home” I say this not as someone who wants to dismiss depression, but as someone who works with mentally ill addicts and sees that a lot of people are perhaps not chemically depressed but situationally, and they’re never given a chance to leave the situation.
Nice comment. They are misdiagnosing people for sure. Also you may disagree with my next statement but some people allow themselves to be misdiagnosed because they are Inherently weak. Easier for them to say I’m mentally ill than to improve themselves. I’ve witnessed it many times
also…a complete (intentional) destruction of any sort of community via unaffordable housing (housing was more affordable during the great depression, than right now…), fostered social seperation/bubbles via algorithms, and backstabbing speculation drive that has infested every level of our economy and government to breed distrust, and of course nonexistent healthcare/job security for large sections of the population which increases stress (a known trigfer for underlying mental conditions)…
I’m certainly not naive enough to ignore that this happens. I do personally believe that these people are outliers and not the rule. But I talk with people who are misdiagnosed all the time. I personally have bipolar with a trend towards mania, and I talk with people who tell me they’re bipolar often enough and they don’t meet the requirements for the diagnosis at all.
And lastly, the stigma of mental illness is fading which is great, but what isn’t is people are self diagnosing themselves left right and center. They then use this self diagnosis as a crutch. Which in my belief is the opposite of what a diagnosis should be, a tool to help you improve your life
There’s also a fuckload of people seeking misdiagnoses for financial gain. You see it in mundane ways like people faking depression or PTSD to get an emotional support animal to get around their apartment’s no pets policy. You also see nearly universal advice to soldiers separating from the military to claim some mental issue to get a partial disability rating.
Not saying that there aren’t genuine occurrences of mental illness, but the amount of fraud is pretty massive.
the game is rigged, playing fair only puts you at a disadvantage…the number of people “faking” is rarely statistically significant.
most people play a fair game, it’s why they never get anywhere…
Child abuse is endemic to most areas of the world. Not just sexual and physical abuse, but humiliations, threats, contempt, lack of love.
There are always prices the older kids and adults pay the suffering through that. It shows up in countless ways.
When society is stable a lot of these symptoms can be hidden or even ameliorated with group activities and cohesion. When things are shaken up, like when there is an Industrial Revolution and families and social bonds are strained for many, like what has been ongoing, the symptoms are more on display.
Also people are starting to pay more attention to different types of suffering, where a few generations before many compulsions and fears and sufferings were not talked about as much.
Right, plus if mental health treatment had such a huge stigma in the past (and probably still does to some extent) breaking the cycle of child abuse becomes vehemently harder.
Late stage capitalism. Also, “people” here applies mostly to the working classes in Western countries, and to an extent, some in the Global South with more significant levels of urbanization. Alienation under late stage capitalism and the US-led neoliberal world order leads to ever increasing precarity and desperation amongst the working class all over the world, as we face crisis after crisis, which is now worse than ever (and nothing new, obviously). In the imperial core, or the Global North (Anglosphere, Western Europe, North America), the dynamic is largely different than it is in the Global South, because every single aspect of life in these countries has become almost completely commodified and controlled by capitalist monopolies or duopolies alongside the death of “localism”, in simple terms, sucking the joy out of life through profit maximization more than ever before. As fewer and fewer people control more and more wealth, in addition to costs of living skyrocketing through inflation, austerity measures, economic warfare (only to be worsened as far as the US goes following the latest stupid tariffs), leading to even more price gouging, this means that people need to take up an increasing number of jobs, or simply begin working longer hours (in addition to pension and other social security vanishing), leading to prolonged burnout and severe mental health issues, which also negatively impacts social lives through atomizing social structures. There’s no doubt that this results in these “mental illnesses”, though I’ve kind of observed that this term is often used in a very bigoted and ableist fashion that lacks nuance.
In the Global South, on the other hand, these dynamics occur differently. Many of us here have only known colonialism, imperialist destabilization, and exploitation in our countries, meant to stifle our socioeconomic development for the benefit of the imperial core, the same countries now suffering this perceived “social decay” the question concerns. We aren’t living through “decaying” labor aristocratic capitalism, unlike the imperial core which attained its “high standards of living” through imperialist superprofits and exploitation, meaning slight breadcrumbs could be distributed to the working class in these countries to placate them and prevent them from gaining class consciousness by offering them a nice, mortgaged house, jobs in the service sector, consumerism derived from overproduction, etc. — instead, we’re living under neocolonialism. This has an adverse effect at the same time, with the primary dialectic here being that, despite us still living under capitalism and thus still being vulnerable to its internal contradictions, we still retain degrees of non-atomized social structures more “free” of alienation, as well of subsistence-based lifestyles based on cooperation — in my country, for example, the informal economy is pretty much omnipresent.
It’s not a binary. It’s proof that capitalism needs to go. Basically, to summarize the above: You either live in a “developed” society where you enjoy temporary privileges and economic prosperity attained through imperialist superprofits that ever so slightly trickle down to you — but capitalist decay and crisis is inevitable and will only worsen for the working class which has no material interest in this mode of production (Global North / imperial core)
…or you live in poverty, IMF-imposed SAP austerity measures meaning zero social services (privatised and sold to imperialist financial cartels), and the economic dependence of your country on imperial powers (France, US, broader West) caused by the same force that leads to the temporary material privileges of the working classes in the Global North, yet your social structures aren’t atomized (meaning no or less significant emergence of hyper-individualism in society, as seen in the West), because you’re literally forced to cooperate socially as opposed to engaging in competition or wage slavery in the typical sense (the norm under capitalism) not to build a better world but to merely subsist (Global South / imperial periphery).
In both scenarios, though, there are no people in power looking after you - and most importantly, your class is not in power of the state.
Also, a relevant video video came to mind about this
Better detection, more acceptance. But also Tylenol.
Tylenol.
Maybe we’ll find out it was microplastics all along.
Lacking social and emotional connection as a very individualistic society?? An increasingly worse quality education system and income inequality gap?? Insurance hurdles for those seeking mental health treatment?? Probably a lot of variables at play.
