Analysis of Mental Health and Drug Use in the Top 21 Most Populated U.S. States

Introduction: Most people in the United States live busy stressful lives which can lead to significant health challenges, especially to one’s mental health. After years of being ignored and stigmatized, mental illness has been given the recognition it deserves. It is now associated with the overall health of a person and treated seriously. The same could be said about substance abuse disorder though on a lesser scale. This paper attempts to understand the relationship between drug use and mental health illness differentiated across age groups. The understanding of these causations and relationships could help us better understand the rate and triggers of mental illness in the United States. Methods: We used data from a 2023 survey, which contains a total of 69,850 completed interviews. The data collected were taken from each state individually with each of them implementing the same survey to collect responses. Instead of looking at all fifty states, we decided to analyze only the highest twenty- one most populated states. Various non-parametric tests were used to analyze age groups and their rate of mental health illnesses and drug use within the country. Results: We found that tobacco use is associated with mental illness, while alcohol use is associated with attempted suicide. It appears that indicators of drug use are not homogeneous across states for either age group. We also found that the alcohol consumption is related to a declining proportion of attempted suicides. Conclusion: In this research we found a significant association between drug use and inidcators of mental illness. The association differed across different age groups and also across states. Since we found that the alcohol consumption is related to a declining proportion of attempted suicides, it will be interesting to explore why this is the case and what could be observed to decrease suicidal rates.