75% Of Young Adults Believe The U.S. Is Suffering From A “Mental Health Crisis”

A new survey released this week has concluded that nearly 75% of young adults across the country agree that “the United States has a mental health crisis.”

The results, released by The Hill this week, were compiled by the Institute for Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. The survey found that only 6% of people who responded to the survey disagreed with “the idea that the U.S. is undergoing a mental health crisis.”

The survey queried “more than 2,000 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 29 from March 15-20”. 

52% of young adults who responded reported “experiencing feelings of depression and hopelessness”, while about 25% of respondents admitted to thinking about self-harm.

In what may be an allusion to the pandemic and lockdowns starting to wind down (unless you live in China), the latter number is down 4% from a year prior, when 28% of respondents said they thought about self-harm. 

More than 25% of respondents said they knew someone who had committed suicide. 

Similar studies have shown that almost half of all young adults experienced mental health symptoms in the second year of the pandemic, The Hill wrote. These findings came as the result of a second study, when researchers at UCSF “”used a sample of 2,809 adults ages 18-25 years from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey data to evaluate the scope of anxiety and depression symptoms from June through early July 2021”. 

48% of those young adults reported mental health symptoms and 39% said they used prescription medications.