(TNND) — Americans’ mental health hasn’t recovered from the hit it took during the pandemic.
A new Gallup survey showed just 29% of people rated their mental health or emotional well-being as “excellent,” with 72% rating it as at least “good.”
Both are new lows in Gallup tracking going back nearly a quarter of a century.
The trend line took a clear drop between 2019 and 2020.
Before the pandemic, 43% of people said they had excellent mental health. That was fairly typical for surveys done over the preceding 18 years.
Then, just 34% said their mental health was excellent in 2020.
And the slide has slowly continued, dipping below 30% for the first time this year.
The declines are seen across demographic subgroups.
Both men and women have registered double-digit drops in their mental health assessments compared to before the pandemic.
Gen X, boomers and the silent generation are all registering lower mental health ratings.
The younger generations of adults, Gen Z and millennials, have registered the deepest declines, down 14 and 16 points, respectively.
Both Republicans (down 13 points) and Democrats (down 9 points) report worse mental health now than they did before the pandemic.
And Americans are seeking help from mental health professionals more now.
Gallup said nearly a quarter of American adults say they’ve visited a mental health professional in the past year.
The average number of annual visits to a mental health professional has risen, too, from 1.5 about 20 years ago to 3.2 now.
Dr. Olivia Tomasco, a primary care physician at Houston Methodist, said she’s seeing more patients share mental health struggles.
And she absolutely sees the pandemic as a turning point in our collective mental health, especially for younger generations who faced the pandemic during their formative years.
The pandemic generated a lot of financial and health uncertainty for people, Tomasco said.
And she said people became really isolated, turning to social media for their human connection.
Life is seemingly back to normal.
But we haven’t gotten over the collective trauma.
“I think that there’s still a lot of uncertainty underneath the surface,” Tomasco said. “Everything might look fine. Yeah, we’re all going out in public now, but people still are turning to social media a lot.”
She said bad habits people developed during the pandemic are still contributing to their poor mental health.
The former surgeon general sounded the alarm a couple of years ago over what he said was a major public health concern: an “epidemic” of loneliness and isolation.
Tomasco said that’s true, and that epidemic of isolation is showing itself in the new Gallup data.
Tomasco repeatedly pointed to social media’s negative effect on mental health, saying she sees patients suffering from “doom scrolling.”
People are “assaulted with negative information that can make them feel a little hopeless, a little uncertain about the future,” she said.
“I have a lot of patients who get on their phones before bed and see something unpleasant, and it activates their fight or flight (response),” Tomasco said. “Their cortisol goes up, and then they can’t sleep. And then bad sleep contributes to that cycle of negative feelings and stress and anxiety overall.”
What can be done to improve our mental health?
Get out in your community and make friends, Tomasco said.
“But it’s not so easy for everyone, especially if people work from home and they’re isolated in that way,” she said.
Tomasco said “mindfulness and movement and connection” can help.
And she said mental health services need to be more accessible and affordable for people.
