As each calendar year passes, you can’t help but notice that mental health issues are increasingly surrounding us at every turn. We see it in our classrooms. We see it on our campuses. We see it on our streets. We see it in our families. We see it in our workplaces. We see it in our friends. And perhaps most of all, we recognize it within the confines of our own minds. Many of us are quite familiar with the crippling feeling of being unable to run from ourselves. If only there was an outer body experience that could put just a little separation between us and the war going on in our brains. In reality, there is nowhere to run. We are stuck with the brain we have. So we try our best to cope. As we witness in HBO’s hit drama Euphoria, there is a wide-range of modern-day narcotics at our disposal. Social media, smartphones and digital distraction. Sex and hookups. Oxy, weed and coke. Netflix and porn. Binge eating and alcohol. Excessive amounts of coffee. Anything to numb the pain. With the words anxiety and depression becoming such commonplace in our society, it’s fair to wonder whether we were already in a pandemic long before the COVID pandemic began in the beginning of 2020. But how bad is this problem, exactly? We can smell the smoke from the burning building from a mile away, yet it requires us getting up close to assess the true damage and how bad the spread actually is. The following mental health statistics help contextualize the problem and ultimately, why the odds are stacked against us in this battle.

Perhaps the only natural place to start unpacking mental health statistics is by pointing out that we refuse to see the problem in the first place. While the West is a little farther along in terms of acknowledging mental health as an actual health issue, this is not the case in many parts of the world. How do we know this? It reflects in terms of how they prioritize it within government spending.

Globally, WHO noted in 2013 that the average percentage of government spending on mental health was just 0.5% of the overall health budget.

This is mind-blogging. And in the years since, it hasn't gotten any better. Take the United States for example. They may be a bit farther along in the de-stigmatization of mental health, but they spent just 5.5% of their annual health budget on mental health. This reflects how high it is on the priority list of the government. And it’s not as if there isn’t a need.

Nearly 25% of the US population has been diagnosed with a mental health disorder, namely PTSD, Bipolar Disorder, Social Anxiety, Schizophrenia, OCD and/or Clinical Depression. Note the importance of the word diagnosed. This percentage does not reflect three categories of people:

1. Those who suffer the general anxieties of life
2. Those who have seasonal depression
3. Those who have not sought help and/or have not been diagnosed

 When you consider these three groups, the reality is that the majority of the population is likely struggling with their mental health in one way or another. And this is just in the United States. As of 2017, there were 792 million worldwide reported to have a mental health disorder. That's 10% of the entire population in the world. Again, this is just what’s been reported among many countries who do not prioritize mental health. How much higher could the actual number be? But maybe you’re not one for speculation and thus, are not convinced. So let’s consider what’s happening on college campuses across America to further articulate the problem.

As our team researched and studied mental health statistics across the globe, the following might have been the most startling discovery for us. In a 2021 study, over 73% of the 33,204 participating college students reported feeling moderate to severe psychological stress. And due to the size of the study, the statistical significance here cannot be ignored. The findings here are consistent with smaller studies of the same nature, presenting a clear and cohesive narrative of the mental health conditions for college students nationwide. In fact, a 2020 Mental Health study from Cornell University, an Ivy League school, found that 40% of students said they were non-functional for at least one week of the year due to depression, stress or anxiety. Another study conducted in early 2022 found that 88% of students believed there is a mental health crisis on college campuses across the United States. The sample size here was not insignificant, as 1,700 students participated. These mental health statistics help paint a fuller picture as to what’s actually transpiring before our eyes. People are desperate, suffering in silence and fear being stigmatized, yet the government is only allowing a fraction of its budget towards the issue. It’s far to wonder why, especially because in some cases, it’s a matter of life-or-death.

It’s fair to say the COVID-19 global pandemic received a ton of attention over the last couple years (and rightly so). So much attention, that at times it felt like the world stopped. Lockdowns ensued. Social distancing became a buzzword. Masks a permanent fixture in societies that had never heard of such a thing. It would probably surprise you then to hear the mortality rate of the mental health crisis rivals that of COVID-19. The latest data from WHO suggests that over 700,000 people worldwide die of suicide every 12 months.

Every 40 seconds, someone takes their own life.

Contrasted to the 6.2 million deaths reported from COVID-19 over the past 30 months, we find that the mental health crisis is at least 28% as deadly. So why is it a footnote stuck at the bottom of the government’s agenda? Before we are tempted to develop stereotypes as to the type of people that actually get to the point of suicide, consider the cases of Katie Meyer and Cheslie Kryst. Katie was on the dean’s list at Stanford University and a star goalie on the school’s soccer team. Cheslie had an MBA from Wake Forest, was a licensed attorney, won the 2019 Miss USA pageant and was nominated for two daytime Emmy awards. Both committed suicide in 2022, just a month apart. An argument could be made that they had reached heights of success in their respective spheres, considered by millennials and Generation Z for what the ideal life could look like. In both cases, their mental health battles were almost undetectable. As mentioned above, they were part of an enormous group in our society that are suffering in silence.

Suicide might be the most tragic outcome of the mental health crisis, yet the alternative outcomes are nothing to blink at. They reflect a reality in which the rest of us are just trying to keep our heads above water. To which, the mental health statistics around coping mechanisms are staggering. Our coping mechanisms come in three primary forms - medicating, distracting and indulging. Typically, we use these mechanisms to reach a positive feeling state, overlooking the harmful side effects that come from repeated usage. Medicate, a verb, means to treat a condition using a drug. So in the most traditional sense, we tend to think of antidepressants and other oral forms of medication for our mental health. Most recent CDC data revealed that 13.2% of adults in the United States are on antidepressants. This represents a 65% increase from just 20 years ago. Given the mental health statistics discussed above, this would be expected. The opioid crisis has been much-documented in the United States and in the last year alone 10.1 million people misused prescription opioids to numb their pain. But we must not limit our understanding of medication to prescription drugs, as there are other substances which we use to comfort ourselves. Namely, food. Obesity rates in the United States hit a record high in 2018, at an eye-popping rate of 42.4%. That means nearly half the population is overweight. In a 2020 report from Cambridge, which ranks among the top 10 universities worldwide, revealed: “The term ‘emotional eating’ has been widely used to refer to.. a tendency to eat in response to negative emotions with the chosen foods being primarily energy-dense and palatable ones. Emotional eating can be caused by various mechanisms, such as using eating to cope with negative emotions or confusing internal states of hunger and satiety with physiological changes related to emotions. An increasing number of prospective studies have shown that emotional eating predicts subsequent weight gain in adults.” In the West, being overweight carries a stigma because it violates the cultural standards of beauty, yet the reality is that (sometimes) it’s just another form of medication we use to cope with our mental health issues.

Who are we to elevate ourselves above others, simply because we have a different drug of choice? Our coping mechanisms can often be subtle, simply in the form of distraction. As in, never be alone with our thoughts.

In 2021, US adults spent over 13 hours per day in media consumption. It’s commonplace when we have that moment by ourselves to habitually pull out our phone, scrolling even though there isn’t anything new to see. The silence is deafening to us. Or maybe it’s simply sitting down on the couch at night and binging hours worth of shows, when this can sometimes be a distraction mechanism masking as what we call “relaxation”. The last coping mechanism, indulgence, often comes in the form of a late-night porn habit that we can’t seem to curb. In 2019, there were over 42 billion visits worldwide to one of the world’s most popular porn sites. The momentary high we get from sex, porn or hookups is commonly used in our society to numb painful emotions and reach a positive-feeling state. And while your personal opinion on the aforementioned coping mechanisms may be neutral, science would beg to differ. In hit 2021 bestseller Dopamine Nation, Stanford’s director of addiction medicine Anna Lembke writes: “We’re living in a time of unprecedented access to high-reward, high-dopamine stimuli: drugs, food, news, gambling, shopping, gaming, texting, sexting, Facebooking, Instagramming, YouTubing, tweeting – the increased numbers, variety and potency are staggering. The smartphone is the modern-day hypodermic needle, delivering digital dopamin 24/7 for a wired generation. As such, we’ve all become vulnerable to compulsive overconsumption.” Later in the book, she explains how all of these coping mechanisms are causing a severe imbalance of the pain-pleasure scale in our brains. They may provide a momentary reprieve, but in the long-term it does nothing to improve our mental health.

One of the biggest outrages the mental health statistics reveal is the uphill battle we face to find support for our mental health. While stigma is declining, at least in the West, there is a significant imbalance between counselors and the overall population. According to the latest statistics from WHO, Canada has 48.7 psychologists per 100,000 population, while the United States has 29.8 psychologists per 100,000. Contrast that with countries like Afghanistan, Ghana and Egypt, who have a combined average of just 0.12 psychologists per 100,000 population. Which means that if you live in one of these countries, support for your mental health is pretty much non-existent. Of course, there are multiple factors that contribute to this, including education. But these countries have also been recognized for perpetuating the stigma of mental health and do not prioritize mental health professions. On college campuses, Yale students recently expressed disappointment and anger over the lack of access to healthcare. In 2021, the Yale News wrote:

“Every student interviewed complained that the chronic understaffing of MHC (Mental Health and Counseling) has resulted in long wait times for appointments and short therapy sessions to accommodate increased demand — for those who can get appointments in the first place.”

The Clay Center for Healthy Minds reports that the ratio of certified counselors to students is 1:1000 - 2000 for small-to-midsize schools and 1:2000-3500 for larger universities. That type of ratio makes it nearly impossible for a counselor to remember your name, let alone get to know you well and give you appropriate care. It doesn’t get much better for K-12 students throughout the United States, as EdSurge reports there are just 111,000 counselors nationwide serving 50.5 million students. That makes for a 455:1 ratio.

When considering the state of mental healthcare in the United States, we must not only look at accessibility, but affordability. As we move past the absurdly imbalanced ratio of counselors to people, we find that costs are sky-high for those that do seek counseling. A large contributing factor to this is that many counselors don’t take insurance. A recent Harvard Medical School article explains, “a much larger proportion accept only a very limited set of plans, making it extremely difficult for patients to find suitable, in-network referrals.” “If you ask a patient to describe their experience finding a therapist or psychiatrist in the community, don’t be surprised if ‘expensive,’ ‘difficult,’ and ‘discouraging’ are some of the first words that come to mind,” they add. So whose fault is this? The same governments that have decided to allocate a minuscule amount of healthcare spending towards mental health. Conditions are made nearly impossible for psychotherapists and psychiatrists. The system is currently set up in such a way that is highly discouraging for therapists to take insurance. And even if they do, it’s exceedingly difficult to get “in-network” access for insurance providers. And even if they make it past THAT step, it’s likely they will drown in paperwork. “Many psychotherapists and psychiatrists received such poor coverage and reimbursement with most health plans that clinicians abstained from a payer system that neglected them and their services, setting a precedent for cash pay practices instead,” Harvard explains.

Out-of-pocket costs for therapy range anywhere from $65/hour all the way up to $450/hour for specialists, which is needed for conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). So basically, this might cost you a small fortune to simply see a therapist once a week.

Let’s do some math. There’s 672 hours in a month. Let’s say we sleep 8 hours a day, which would cover an additional 224 hours. That leaves us with 448 hours left. Here’s the equation: 4 hours a month / 448 hours we are awake = .008% This is the reality we are living in. Pay enormous out-of-pocket costs to receive counseling support for less than 1% of our waking hours. Not the most encouraging mental health statistics. This simply doesn’t cut it and doesn’t even come close to meeting the needs of a mental health pandemic. Consider those with clinical depression or those experiencing suicidal ideation, which is no small amount. It may cost a small salary to simply keep up with the costs, in addition to all of our other regular living expenses.