Are some countries better in terms of mental health than others?

In 2014, Tara Thiagarajan, a neuroscientist who ran a microfinance company in rural India, spent her free Sundays picking up a portable EEG headset and reading, “Modernization is for us.” “What is it doing to the brain?” I wondered.

In a DIY experiment using themselves and their colleagues as a baseline, they found significant differences in brain activity between urban brains that have been exposed to modernization all their lives and those who have spent their lives living in small villages in India. I discovered something. At the time, criticism of mental health research was that it was based primarily on results from a small sample of Western university students, and that differences in modernization and exposure to technology could lead to poor mental health outcomes around the world. The argument was that the experimental design was inadequate to determine what effect it had on health.

By 2020, she founded a nonprofit organization called Sapien Labs, which conducted a survey of 49,000 people in eight English-speaking countries to measure Sapien’s first “Mental Health Index,” the World’s Mental State (MSW). ) published a report. ”, or the respondent’s mental health score. The results were not great. Compared to 2019 responses, 2020 mental health scores (specifically those that captured the onset of the pandemic) fell by 8 percent. 44% of young adults reported a clinical level of risk, compared to just 6% of adults 65 and older.

On Monday, Sapien released its fourth annual World Mental Status Report, which includes data from more than 400,000 respondents in 71 countries and 13 languages. Bottom line: Our modern human psyche doesn’t seem to have recovered from the dip at the beginning of the pandemic.

The mental health report is part of a larger initiative, the Global Mind project, in which Sapien Labs uses survey data. Survey data is collected continuously throughout the year (you can fill out the assessment here; it takes approximately 15 minutes to complete). In addition to measuring your mental state, you can also look for the cause.

If “modernization” is harming our minds, as Mr. Thiagarajan suspects, then what exactly is harming our minds? “The Global Mind project allows for very large-scale understanding that was previously not possible, very quickly,” he said.

Along with our annual overview of mental health, this project provides a more comprehensive overview of the various scourges that modern society can bring, such as access to smartphones at a young age, ultra-processed foods, and the breakdown of family relationships. We publish targeted reports.

“Increasing wealth and economic development does not necessarily lead to improved mental well-being, but may instead lead to a fraying of consumption patterns and social bonds, negatively impacting our ability to thrive,” the report said. I’m warning you.

Many of the charts in Our World in Data show that economic growth is very closely aligned with human prosperity over the long term. The evidence that economic growth goes hand in hand with the goods and services that enable human flourishing is compelling, but as my colleague Sigal Samuel reports, finding the path closest to human well-being This is still a lively ongoing debate.

Thiagarajan takes a nuanced approach and opposes a simple binary choice between growth and degrowth. Rather, she argues, what matters is how wealth is created and what purposes it is used for. Or, as economist Mariana Mazzucato likes to say, what matters is the “direction” of growth, and whether it is for the common good.

“At the moment, growth is causing harm,” Thiagarajan said. “But there are different types of growth.”

How to measure mental health

At this time, there is no exact science on mental health, let alone a perfect cross-cultural study. “People commonly confuse things like mental well-being and happiness,” Thiagarajan says. However, when comparing the results of their mental health survey to the World Happiness Report (WHR) published by Oxford’s Center for Wellbeing Research, many of the results are reversed.

The Dominican Republic and Sri Lanka had the highest average scores for mental well-being on the World’s Mental Health list. They are ranked 73rd and 112th respectively in the World Happiness Report. Tanzania ranks 3rd in MSW and 128th in WRH. what happened?

The World Happiness Report focuses on capturing what Thiagarajan describes as “emotions.” This involves respondents rating their life satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10 and measuring daily whether they felt laughed, entertained, or interested in the previous day.but you could feel It’s great, but it still doesn’t work well in the world. Following the World Health Organization’s definition of mental health, which includes the ability to function productively and contribute to society, Thiagarajan wanted to capture functioning in his global mind project as well.

To construct the Mental Health Index, Thiagarajan and her team discovered 126 different assessments used across academic and clinical settings and distilled them into 47 dimensions of mental health. Did. Second, MHQ sets questions along a scale of impact on your life, rather than asking about frequency, such as “How many times did you feel sad yesterday?” This is based on the idea that it’s easier to report how much something impacts your life than how many times. The number of times I drank water and the number of times I laughed the day before (I couldn’t say either of those yesterday).

Their results produce numbers along a 300-point scale from “distress” at the low end to “prosperity” at the high end.

Global Mind Project / 4th World State of Mind Report

For 2023, the global average across the 71 countries they received data from was 65. This goes to show that we are all doing just a little bit more than just “getting by” and “enduring.”

The problem: smartphones, ultra-processed foods, and disintegrating families.

There is a widespread theory that the modern world was created in 2012, as stated by former neuroscientist and author Eric Hoell. For social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, 2012 also marked the beginning of his teenage mental illness epidemic.

MHQ’s four-year research findings are consistent. Before 2010, young people tended to dominate surveys on happiness, mood, and outlook. But the most persistent trend observed from 2019 to this year’s report is that young people in every country measured, from Africa to Asia, Europe to the Americas, (required to have access to the internet) overall mental well-being was lower. .

Young people, who were once at the peak of reported happiness, have fallen to the absolute bottom, while others, such as those over 65, remain essentially unchanged.

More precisely, in the eight English-speaking countries where data was collected since 2019, the population of 18-24 and 25-34 year-olds has declined by 14-17 percent. As the age group increases, the decline gradually flattens out.

Global Mind Project/Fourth World State of Mind Report.

A report on smartphone use released in May by the Global Mind Project suggests that the smartphone hypothesis, advanced by psychologists like Jean Twenge, is valid. “The younger you get a smartphone, the worse off you are as an adult,” Thiagarajan says.

The more we break down the demographics, the more we see that the impact of smartphone use is concentrated on young women. But when we look at another potential causative factor they recently announced, the consumption of ultra-processed foods, we see that those effects are universal across all demographics. “It affects everything, every aspect of mental functioning,” Thiagarajan says.

Their report points out the complexities involved in defining ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and offers a simple rule of thumb: foods that contain substances rarely found in home kitchens (specifically, the UPF category It is worth noting that the whole thing is still under scrutiny). to target plant-based foods). Even after trying to control for indirect effects of exercise frequency and income, the researchers found that people who took UPF several times a day had a threefold increased risk of serious mental health problems.

There are many other variables that can cause confusion, such as how often you cook and how often you share meals, but the results are very important. “What we’re looking at is when you filter out all the other 100 things that you can get data on,” he says Thiagarajan. And ultra-processed foods seem to account for at least a third of the global mental health burden we’re seeing. ”

The final cause she cited was family. And yes, there are reports on that too, finding that the breakdown of family relationships across the modern world is a major factor in the decline in young people’s mental well-being. The report claims that families with less exposure to modern institutions and technology tend to have stronger and more numerous family bonds, which is closely related to improved psychological well-being.

Thiagarajan explained that when he received his first MHQ results, he wondered why countries like Venezuela and Tanzania came out on top. “But it depends on these factors,” she said. “They don’t import all the westernized ultra-processed food because they can’t afford it. They don’t give smartphones to their young children. And they have large families and they live together. .”

She pointed out that given the speed and scale of the “problem” – modernity – we are forced to act on the basis of incomplete knowledge. One of the goals of the Global Mind Project, across MHQ and its more targeted reports, is to help find the most effective places to target policy efforts, particularly regulation.

“If it’s free, people will take the easiest shortcut for short-term gain at the expense of their mental health,” she said.

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