About
Mental Health Trends provides the world's first real-time estimates of population mental wellbeing
Building on our past efforts to describe mental health trends using big media data, including discovering seasonality in nine types of mental illness , describing trends in psychological distress , and understanding the health concerns of the public, we validated the use of Internet searches to describe population mental health trends.
How does Mental Health Trends work?
We estimate levels of psychological distress using search data provided by Google, in combination with machine learning, and historical information about American's mental health from the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) -the world’s largest, ongoing telephone health survey system- to provide an accurate estimate of mental wellbeing in the United States. Specifically, we used past responses to the BRFSS healthy mental days questionaire, “Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress, depression, and problems with emotions, for how many days during the past 30 days was your mental health not good?,” as a criterion to build algorithms to select out the Internet searches that most accurately reflect this measure when treated as a continuous time series across all BRFSS survey years from 2009 through 2015.
Can I use these data in my work?
We encourage everyone to use these data when describing contemporary trends in population mental wellbeing. When making reference to Mental Health Trends we we ask that you cite:
CITATION TBD
We also encourage you to learn from our formative and development studies:
Ayers JW, Althouse BM, Dredze M. Could Behavioral Medicine Lead the Web Data Revolution? JAMA. 2014;311:1399-1400.
Althouse BM, Allem JP, Childers MA, Dredze M, Ayers JW. Population health concerns during the United States' Great Recession. Am J Prev Med. 2014;46:166-170.
Ayers JW, Althouse BM, Allem JP, Rosenquist JN, Ford DE. Seasonality in seeking mental health information on google. Am J Prev Med. 2013;44:520-525.
Ayers JW, Althouse BM, Allem JP, et al. Novel surveillance of psychological distress during the great recession. J Affect Disord. 2012;142:323-330.
Who made Mental Health Trends?
Mental Health Trends relies on a team of experts bridging public health, data analytics, and computer science.
John W. Ayers Ph.D. M.A.
Mark Dredze Ph.D.
Benjamin Althouse Ph.D. Sc.D.