Mental Health in America
According to the 2020 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 21.0% of Americans aged 18 and older experienced symptoms of any mental illness – defined as "any mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder in the past year of sufficient duration to meet DSM-IV criteria" – between 2019-2020. Though this may not seem like a high number, this data reflects real people and real struggles.
21 OUT OF 100 PEOPLE
What This Number Means
Sometimes data doesn’t reflect the full picture – it’s hard to quantitatively measure the human condition. This project offers a data visualization tool to “re-humanize” this statistic.
Use the drop-down menu below to generate your chosen number of profile pictures. Some of the profile photos will represent American adults who experienced any mental illness in 2019-2020, indicated by a black border around the image. Note: to experience the full effects of this visualization, this website is best viewed on a laptop screen or larger.
Disclaimer
To protect users’ privacy, none of the people in these photos are real. Instead, all profile images were generated from This Person Does Not Exist, an API that computes hyper-realistic images of fake people. In addition, the photos displayed are in no way representative of measured distributions amongst different demographic groups.