Yuning Wang (yw3438); Aiming Liu (al3998); Qi Lu (ql2370); Yucong Jiang (yj2581); WeiRan Zhang (wz2506)

Motivation

Mental illnesses are conditions that affect a person’s thinking, feeling, mood or behavior, such as depression, anxiety or bipolar disorder.

Mental health is an important component of overall health.Mental health problems can increases the risk for many types of physical health problems,for example diabetes,cancer,obesity,heart disease and so on. Similarly, the presence of chronic physical health problems can also increase the risk for mental health problems.

Dataset

We utilized the 500 Cities: Local Data for Better Health, 2018 release dataset. This dataset includes 2016, 2015 model-based small area estimates for 27 measures of chronic disease related to unhealthy behaviors (5), health outcomes (13), and use of preventive services (9). Data were provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Division of Population Health, Epidemiology and Surveillance Branch. The project was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in conjunction with the CDC Foundation.

We were interested in visualizing the mental health situations over United States, so we filtered measure variables related to mental health and possible causes of mental health problems, including diabetes, obesity, cancer, binge drink and sleeping hours.

Data about U.S. states and territories’ income, U.S. states and territories’ educational attainment and U.S. population race were also used in analyzing the cause of mental health problems.

The current dataset includes prevalence estimates mainly in 2016.

Findings

The risk factors of mental health problems include experiences related to other ongoing (chronic) medical condition and unhealthy behaviors. From the results of our analysis, diabetes，obesity and sleeping less than 7 hours have a positive association with mental health problems. However, cancer have a negative associations with bad mental health.

Using alcohol is also closely related to mental health conditions according to CDC. Results show that alcohol usage has a negative relationship with mental health problems.

Social factors like household income and education levels also have negative relationships with bad mental health. The relationship between mental health and race depends on ethnicities.

Maps related to prevalence of bad mental health indicated that mental health conditions in middle and western U.S. were better than eastern U.S.. We observed that the sleeping hours of people in the east of United States are less than that of the west. The prevalence of obesity is higher in Mississippi and Michigan, but the prevalence of cancer has little differences among all the cities.

Overview

For a brief overview of our project website, view our screencast here