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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2699 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 8, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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See if there were any large cohort surveys done across the decades with questions like “would you say you are happy with your life”, “how often do you think about killing yourself”, “do you consider your life to have purpose”, “do you look forward to the future”, “how often do you feel gratitude”

IMO you can’t do “deaths of despair” because Americans have more cheap distractions now than ever, which is certainly preventing some from suicide. You can’t do mental health diagnosis because criteria changes and because of availability differences.

I found https://www.samhsa.gov/data/nsduh/national-releases there is a number in each years report like this:

Among adults aged 18 or older in 2021, 22.8% (or 57.8 million people) had any mental illness (AMI) in the past year.

In 2021, 5.5% of adults aged 18 or older (or 14.1 million people) had serious mental illness (SMI) in the past year.

I think this will be a decent way to see the trend. It is self-reported but there would be some consistency due to some of the same respondents self-reporting over multiple years.

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