The Science of Aging Well: How Your Beliefs Affect Your Health
Editor’s Note: This article is #2 in a multi-part series on research conducted by The Council for Disability Awareness prior to and throughout the pandemic.
During April 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau, together with five federal agencies, launched an experimental survey “designed to deploy quickly and efficiently, collecting data to measure household experiences during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.” I initially wrote this article on July 15, 2020, using Week 10 data from the Household Pulse Survey.
“In order to support the nation’s recovery, we need to know the ways this pandemic has affected people’s lives and livelihoods,” the Census Bureau explains. To this end, one of their partner agencies, the National Center for Health Statistics, included a set of questions on the frequency of anxiety and depression symptoms. Read more about the questions, and how responses are scored here. The bottom line: All surveys are imperfect, but this one is a lot less imperfect than most others.
So, let’s take a look at what the first ten weeks’ worth of Household Pulse Survey data told us about the state of U.S. adults’ mental health during the Covid-19 pandemic.
But first, some preliminary “data-geek throat-clearing”: My data source is a downloaded CSV dataset obtained from NCHS via this landing page, and the indicator I’m working with is Symptoms of Anxiety Disorder or Depressive Disorder. (See the Scoring and Estimation Technical Note here— you’ll have to scroll down– for details on how survey responses are coded and interpreted to determine whether or not someone has symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder.)
Now, let’s start our tour.
No doubt about it: People are way more anxious and depressed than they were a year ago
NCHS is still working on results of its 2019 National Health Interview Survey, but it published an early release of mental health estimates, specifically for use as benchmarks for comparison to the Household Pulse Survey. This chart (see below) includes the 2019 benchmark:
Not only were there way more people reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression in July 2020 than a year ago, but there was evidence of an upward trend.
Now, Let’s take a look at a couple of high-level slices of this data. (And keep in mind that the slices are applicable for 2020 data only. Detailed 2019 benchmark comparison data didn’t come out until the fall 2020, when NCHS released the complete results of last year’s National Health Interview Survey).
There’s a gender gap, but could it be narrowing?
As the National Institute of Mental Health observes, men typically have lower prevalence of mental illness than women (although men with mental illness are less likely to have received treatment, and are more likely to die by suicide). So the gender gap evident in Household Pulse Survey data wasn’t surprising. But what I found interesting was the narrowing of the gap in Week 10.
Age makes a difference!
The big takeaway here was that as the ages increased, the symptoms of anxiety and depression decreased. People in their 70’s and 80’s (and beyond) were the least likely to be anxious or depressed – although that upward trend that started in week 8 for the age 80+ group was noteworthy.
On the other end of the age spectrum, more than half of the 18-29 age group had symptoms of anxiety and depression in Week 10. And finally, there’s the uptick, starting in week 8, in the number of anxious and depressed thirtysomethings: What’s that all about? (I have some hypotheses I want to check out, using the detailed Public Use Files.)
Speaking of Public Use Files: I’ve done some deeper dives using PUF’s for Weeks 1 – 8 that indicate there’s a consistent “gender gap” within each age group.
Level of education makes a difference, too (at least on either end of the spectrum)
Adults with at least a bachelor’s degree had lower rates of anxiety/depression than adults in other educational-attainment categories. Adults who hadn’t received a high-school diploma had the highest rates.
But with regard to the in-between categories, it was the adults with some college (and not the ones who stopped their formal education on graduating high school) who were a bit more likely to report symptoms of anxiety or depression. (I haven’t done a Z-test on the scores for those two groups to determine if they’re statistically significant.) If the “some college” group included current college students (including older working adults who were pursuing a degree on a part-time basis), I can understand how they might come out higher, given all of the upheaval in the world of higher ed caused by the pandemic.
And yes, there are racial/ethnic differences
Asians (mostly) had the lowest percentage of adults with anxiety and depression symptoms – although there was an uptick from Week 9 to Week 10 that puts them, for that last week at least, essentially in the same position as Whites.
On the other hand, the highest percentage of adults with anxiety and depression symptoms was in the Other/Multiple category. Finally, the percentage of Hispanic/Latino adults with anxiety and depression symptoms were slightly higher than the percentage of Blacks with those symptoms.
Speaking of micro data….
I took a look at micro data for Weeks 1 – 8 to identify trends by income level and work status. See here for what I saw regarding income and here for work status.
And now, I have an “ask” for you, dear readers
• Did you find anything surprising here? If so, what?
• Did you see anything in the data that I didn’t notice or point out? If so, what?
• What additional dimensions, besides the ones highlighted here, do you think are worth exploring?
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